"The _Sardonic smile_, so celebrated in antiquity, baffles research much more than the _intemperie_, nor have modern physiologists thrown any light on the nature of the deleterious plant which produces it. The tradition at least seems still to survive in the country, and Mr. Tyndale adduces some evidence to show that the _Ranunculus sceleratus_ was the herb to which these exaggerated qualities were ascribed. Some insular antiquaries have found a different solution of the ancient proverb. The ancient Sardinians, they say, like many barbarous tribes, used to get rid of their relations in extreme old age by throwing them alive into deep pits; which attention it was the fashion for the venerable objects of it to receive with great expressions of _delight_: whence the saying of a Sardinian laugh (vulgo), laughing on the wrong side of ones mouth. It seems not impossible, that the phenomenon may have been a result of the effects of 'Intemperie' working on weak constitutions, and in circumstances favourable to physical depression--like the epidemic chorea, and similar complaints, of which such strange accounts are read in medical books." GERONIMO. PRIVATE AMOURS OF OLIVER CROMWELL. I know nothing more of the enclosed, than that I found it with the MS. which I lately sent you on the subject of Cromwell's "Dealings with the Devil" (Vol. iii., p. 282.). I should conclude it to be a carelessly-made transcript of a contemporary MS., the production, probably, of some warm royalist, who may, or may not, have had some grounds for his assertions. At all events, it gives a few curious details, and, in its general outline, agrees singularly with the incidents on which Mrs. Behn's play, _The Round Heads; or The Good Old Cause_, is founded: sufficiently so to give it at least an air of authenticity, so far as the popular belief of the day was concerned. S. H. H.