MISCELLANEOUS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 608, 31 May 1851, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

An article in Blackwood's Magazine on Modern State Trials, contains the following anecdote : Mr. Fletcher, a Judge in Ireland, in the year 1812, thus addressed an Irish jury in a trial for murder occasioned in a duel: “ Gentlemen, it is my business to lay down the law to you, and I shall do so. Where two people go out to fight a duel, and one of them falls, the law says it is murder ; but at the same time, a fairer duel I never heard of in the whole course of my life.” The prisoners were of course immediately acquitted. An enormous wire rope weighing 20 tons and measuring 6,oooyards in length,-and 4’ inches in circumference, has been received in Liverpool, and is to be employed working the trains through the Edgehill tunnel at the London and Northwestern Railway.

The Bourse, in Paris, is now closed at 3 p.m., by order of the government, and the speculators are made to disperse. The reason given for this is that false rumours are circulated by the stock-jobbers to take in the unwary. " A new tenor has been discovered in Paris. Among the choruses was heard the most beautiful voice, singing execrably the music of the “Favorita.” It was found to be that of a young man of twenty-four years of age, completely uneducated, incapable. either of readings or writing. The Academy of Music has boarded, lodged, and instructed him, given him a musical education, and is about to bring him before the public, fully persuaded that he will prove one of the first singers of the age. / Lola Montes has in press her “ Memorabilia” in four octavo volumes. This work, whose revision has been confined to a Diplomat, who played a conspicuous part under Louis Philippe, will simultaneously appear in English, French and German. Two volumes are devoted to her Bavarian career, and comprise letters and unpublished original songs of the enamored King Louis. Auber’s new grand opera in five acts, of “ L’Enfant Prodigue,” has been produced at the French Opera House, with Mmes. Viardot and Laborde and Mr. Roger, for whom Meyerbeer wrote the Prophem, . Alboni, on her return from Madrid will sing in a new opera written for her by Auber. and called “La Corbeille d’Oranges," the Basket of Oranges. The celebrated vase, in the gallery of the Vatican at Rome, supposed to be that con-

taining the ashes of the sons of Germanicus, some say of Augusto*—was recently thrown from its pedestal by the falling of a window, driven in by a fierce gale. , ’ .< ? Mme. Louisa Henrietta Scbmalz, the most famous German Cantratice of the last century, and who for more than thirty years was the Queen of the German Lyrical Stage, has just died in Berlin, aged 79. The King of Naples has prohibited the sale or perusal of the works of Schiller, Moliere, Lamartine, the Cosmos of Humbolt, Thiers, Sismondi, Shakspeare, Lucian, Lucretius and Sophocles.