To those interested in the mechanical sciences, and their application to manufactures and the arts, England offers larger scope of observation than any other country in the world. Throughout the vast establishments of our cotton, woollen, linen, silk, and hardware manufactures, there is even less to create astonishment in the multitude and variety of the products, than in the exquisite perfection of the machinery employed--machinery, such in kind, that it seems almost to usurp the functions of human intelligence. No one can conceive its completeness, who has not witnessed the workings of the power-loom, or seen the mechanism by which the brute power of steam is made to effect the most minute and delicate processes of tambouring. Nor can any one adequately comprehend the mighty agency of the steam-engine, who has not viewed the machinery of some of our mining districts, where it is employed on a scale of magnitude and power unequalled elsewhere. In Cornwall,[5] especially, steam-engines may be seen working with a thousand horse power, and capable (according to a usual mode of estimating their perfection as machinery) of raising nearly 50,000,000 pounds of water through the space of a foot, by the combustion of a single bushel of coals. No Englishman, especially if destined to public life, can fitly be ignorant of these great works and operations of art which are going on around him; and if time can be afforded in general education for Paris, Rome, and Florence, time is also fairly due to Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield.--_Q. Rev._ [5] It is a remarkable proof of the amount of improvement effected in some of the Cornish steam engines, that the result obtained from a given quantity of coal, estimated in the manner alluded to above, is nearly three times as great now as it was twenty years ago. Nor will the spectator find more cause for astonishment in the magnitude of these engines, than in the order, or even beauty, of every minute part pertaining to them. The furniture of a drawing-room is not more scrupulously arranged, or preserved in a state of higher polish, than are those huge representatives of human power. * * * * * LEARNING FRENCH. Fashion dominates in this, as in other things. Of late its dictation has been to cradle children in French; often, even to prohibit English in the nursery and school-room; and, frequently, at a later time, to detach our youth from their own country, for the sake of forwarding the same object in foreign _pensions_, or schools. We have seen this fashion extending itself to more mature life; and serious and discreet men, senators and judges, toiling painfully through elements, vocabularies, and rules of pronunciation, to acquire an amount of speech sufficient to attract ridicule, and produce inconvenience, but very inadequate to any useful or ornamental purpose.--_Ibid._