HISTORY AT ONE VIEW,-

Auckland Times, Volume 3, Issue 118, 15 April 1845, Page 4

HISTORY AT ONE VIEW,-

Arrranged expressly with art eye to the Society toy the Confusion. of Useful Knowledge. (* 'ram Punch.) The very great advantages of getting together a vast quantity of facts in such a form as to lake them in at a single view, cannot fora moment be doubted We have had “The Wo Id at one Vie#/’ printed in long narrow columns, on a single sheet, for only one penny, and placing that generally dearbought commodity, a know edge of tire worid, within the reach of every one. The system of concentration has been app led to almost every department of science and art —from the pocket encyclopedia down to the concentrated luncheon, which is s-dd to combine a basin cf soup iu a mvsteriouslookig piece of glutinous compound about the size of a walnut. Histcy at one view has, however, been j until now a desideratum amongst intellect ! ual luxuries, and we shall therefore endrai v-our to supply the deficiency as briefly as J possible. In order to render our universal history complete, and bring distant eras as well as nations beneath the eve of the reader at ft glance, we shall go regu atly through.

the year,; assigning to each month the events that properly be’ong to it, ■ On* the Ist of January—for we like to begin at the beginning, even if when leaving off we arrive at no particular ‘end- the Greeks declared themselves , free, which was no doubt taking a very great liberty ; and on the Teg* same cby three years, beirlg in 1325, Mr.,Canning recognised the indepenoenbe of Buenos Ayres n name that must be familiar to ad the visitors of Margate. j \ Supposing the year 1C45 to: have corn-meacc-d on a Monday, Archbishop Laud must have been beheaded ou Wednesday week, for all the authodties concur in fix urn his execution for the Kith. This melancholy circumstance wak followed, after an Interval of one hundred. and forty four years and tea days, by the eo’omzatiou of Australia.

Intending to :p ese ve a chronological accuracy in our history, we naturally come to February; and we find King Richard wills ransomed on the fourth ; while on the 10th, after an interval of a few centuries, the marriage of Prince Albert with her Majesty was duly solemnised. On the re?y next day Mr. T. Dunombe moved in the House of Commons to relieve certain persons from the payment cf chinch rates • and it -if a remarkable :i that the honorable member selected the anniversary of the birth of Voltaire for his bold experiment, On tuning back to England we And hare-hunting* finishing oa . the 27ih, while the -- Jth, winch,, from it 3 . coining only once in four years, must always be a remarkable day, was, in 1841, distinguished still further by the (all of the bridge foil at Wate 100. It was a little earier in the very same month, preceding the lasi event, however, by about six and eighty vears, that ; Angia was taken prisone . If this individual was irritable, which we ha*e no reason to doubt, he must, if angry be me, have 'been afterwards Angria still, so that he would have retained his se./-possession even b captivity.

It was in the eventful month of March that "Sir Hugh Middleton, the ioundpr of the New Liver Canal, whose head was so full of it. shat it was a wonder he did not ! peri/), from ah attack of water on the j bpain, disappeared from the canvas of hisI tory. He died on the 10th. and it is a 1 fact worthy of remark that Julius C*esar was assasinated on the loth; so that the ides of March were equally fatal to Sir Hugh and the Roman Emperor. On the sth the troops at Myso e we e attacked bv General Harris, and subject, no doubt, to a general harrassiag.

. The Jst of A pril~a day generally sacred to fools—was most appropriuiely occcupied in 1823 by ihe third reading of a Biii in the Commons for the regulation of lunatic*; and so soon after as the second, though it is true seven years had then elapsed, an innkeeper, who?# name has not been handed down to us, was indicted at. Monmouth tor tefrising admittance to a trave Isl

It was on the 10th that the Poles took several cannons from the Russians, at Sedlitz, and having loaded the guns, perhaps with seal its powder, caused a terribe effe - vesence in the ranks of the enemy. On the 19th of May a discussion arose on the disfranchisement of East Retford, and singularly enough on the very next, day a Bishop was installed at Rotten - ouigh so that rottenness was in one case deprived of a member, while in the. other it was enriched with a prelate. This very 3 9th of May is remarsable for the beheading of Anne Boleyn, a. js3(i; white Anna Bolena, almost three hundred years afterwards, was beautifully executed at the opera. The Ist of June must ever be memorable in history, not on y ou account of the victory ot Howe, but from the fact that it was on this day that Prince Albert first took the chair at a public meeting. The 3td of the month had already been made famous, in 1818, by the sur mider of IHjee Row 10 the Eng ish ; and when we consider what a row there was in India at the time, we took Lack even now with satis.ac ion to the incident.

July began, in IJ9O, uncommonly well* for it opt-ned with the bafle of the Boyne, but it finished, in 174 J, with the d ath of Richard Savage, being about one hundred years before his Life was very successfully attempted by Mr. Charles Whitehead. There cannot be a doubt that woodpaving is oue of the most remarkable in'cations of the present remarkable age; and the Ist of August 1842, will ever be

regarded with interest, on aco -unt of its having been the day-ou-which a patent was i.ranted to Alfred John Phipps, for some alleged improvement! in the wooden pavement. On the Bth, preparations were made for aa attach on Pondicherry, a place which was so often taken and retaken by the English ami .the Freni b, —which, in fact, wavered so constantly between the’one and the other, — that instead of Pondicherry, Bob-cherry would have been a more appropriate to call it bv, • The ;fire of London is an enocli ,in universal history which gives a dignity to the 2nd of September that the' day might no' otherwise have obtained $ ai d a termination being p;nt to the c ;is ence of Coke on the 3rd, wou'd hove:- seemed -natural enough; ebnside<:in* that such a fere as that of London -would have been sufficient ;o have reduced any ok eLi ashes. Unfortunatelylor the hypothesis; Cdkewasgone thirty 1 wo years before the bre king out of the fire in which lie might have been consumed. The Deccan prize money is a subject with whack most, people are familiar ’by name, but it was Reserved for the historian to throw-n further light ou it. It mav help to dissqlve the mists or obscurity in which tbfr matter —as fa? as concerns the generaf reader —is involved, when we Ma eitas a fact of-which ibete cannot be a doubt, that on the 4th of October, 1758, Hussy? was recalled from the Deccan, and that Lallv was actually the party recalling him, A care'fal examination of the whole progress of the British connection with India has enabled us to make this statement with all >he confidence Unit can alone give real value to the labours of tin historian. But, thorn?!i it was Laily who reca led Bossy from the Deccan, it was the King of Oude who soon alfe wards attempted to seize ui on Bentraß a piece of impudence that has obtained for the King of Oude’s sauce a. notoriety that scarcely any other saued has been attended with.

November is a month in itself so suggestive of obscurity and fog, that the sialversai historian can hard v be expected tt» o serve a very considerable clearness in his narrative. Cm tarn it is, however, that Herod died on live 7th. while J- - day, a. B. )594, p-oved fatal to .Sir Mu tin Frobisher. We ought- not to emit to mention that on the 0111, —vhieh we need hardly remark, was Guy Fawkes’ dav,— Str Lyre Con e, who teared »o f danger in any guise, attacked Ilyder a’ a t risks"; and tlte gallant Coote, whose motto was Conte <jvi Conte, gave to Hyder a licking that his audacity fully merited. The brilliant career of Napoleon Buonaparte has given to the times iu which he lived an. interest that the histo ian cannot Slope to enhance, though it will be his own fault if he hapnen to diminish it. December first saw him Consul, as we’l as Emper or, and in the same month he made Saxony a kingdom ; t ut having twice alter. wards subdued it, he seems to have takers Saxony in hand only for the purpose of dom ly mihing it. We had almost forgot to allude to the procamatiun of Bustamente, which appeared on the Ist of December, 1B3& It called the people to arms ; but who the people we e, or wheher they came to amis at Bustamantes call, are points which we cannot with certainty decide, and on which we are not liy any means disposed, just now, to speculate. The month of December has received from the poet of truth and nature the epithet ot 44 dark and as the bard of Avon has used the expression, *• da k December,” we-should doubtless offend his admirers if we did not 4 pronounce it to be a phrase full of everything great and eloquent. It was not, however, too dark—at least iu the year 1841—to alow of one Wiliam Edward Newton, taking out on the 14th a patent for -printing and delineating ; atterns for floo'-cloths, a task which he «e u illyachieved on the day, month and year which we have specified. We must not omit to slate, that a 1 out. the middle of December, 1683, Ibe English were driven • out of Bantam ; and as lie must have been a regular Bantam cock, who succeeded in driving them out, it is to be regretted that ins name has eluded the search of the historian.

Oui task is over, \ve set, out wi h a determination to make our history universal, and we trust that the promise in our opening observations have ueen adhered 10 faithfully.