Pass, little mortal, pass! Grow like the vernal grass— The autumn sickle shall destroy thy prime. But nations shout the word Which ne’er before they heard, The name of glory, fearful yet sublime. The Pharaohs are forgot, Their works confess them not: Pass, hero! pass,—poor straw upon the gulf of Time!” It will be remembered how Napoleon’s disastrous Egyptian campaign ended; and how he secretly embarked for France, and read during his passage both the Bible and the Koran with great assiduity. Among the interesting memorials of Mary Queen of Scots at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, there remains the Sun-dial placed in the centre of the palace-garden, and usually denominated “Queen Mary’s Dial.” It is the apex of a richly-ornamented pedestal, which rests upon a hexagonal base, consisting of three steps. The form of the ‘horologe’ is multangular; for though its principal sections are pentagonal, yet from their terminating in pyramidal points, and being diametrically opposed to each other, again connected by triangular interspaces, it presents no fewer than twenty sides, on which are placed twenty-two dials, inserted into circular, semicircular, and triangular cavities. Between the dials are the royal arms of Scotland, with the initials M. R., St. Andrew, St. George, _fleurs-de-lis_, and other emblems. This memorial carries us back nearly three centuries, when Holyrood was a palace Where “Mary of Scotland” kept her court. --------------------- Footnote 8: The _Town and Country Magazine_, edited by Albert Smith. Footnote 9: N. T. Heineken; _Notes and Queries_, 3d series. Footnote 10: We remember this motto for many years beneath a large figure of Time, executed in Coade and Seeley’s composition, and placed at the corner of the lane leading from Westminster Bridge Road to Pedlar’s Acre. ---------------------------- THE HOUR-GLASS. The use of the Hour-glass can be traced to ancient Greece. In Christie’s Greek Vases, one is engraved from a scarabæus of sardonyx, in the Towneley collection: it is exactly like the modern hour-glass. The first mention of it occurs in a Greek tragedian named Bato. On a bas-relief of the Mattei Palace, of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, Morpheus holds an hour-glass; and from Athenæus it appears that persons, when going out, carried it about with them, as we do a watch. In a woodcut in Hawkins’s _History of Music_, the frame is more solid, and the glass probably slipped in and out. There is another cut of one in Boissard, held by Death, precisely of the modern form. The hour or sand-glass is liable to the objection, that it requires a horary attendant, as is intimated in the glee: