MISCELLANEOUS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 68, 16 February 1884, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

Leo. XIII. has appointed the Bev. Dr. O’Callagan, rector of the English college in Rome, to be one of his domestic prelates. The police of Vienna have taken possession of a clandestine printing-office, whence Social Revolutionary pamphlets have been issued of late. Prince Victor, the elder son of Prince Napoleon, has just completed his year’s services in an artillery regiment quartered at Orleans. A writer, after weighing the claims of the various cities to be the birthplace of Rubens, arrives at the conclusion that the palm must, in all probability, be awarded to that town where ins mother was staying at the time. The North American Scientific Review has an article on “Early Man.” Oh, yes, but there’s nothing scientific about him. He’s me man that comes in at 3 o’clock in the morning singing “ In the morning by the bright light.” ii gn Art. —A gentleman, in recently criticising certain full-length saints depicted on the oriel window of a fashionable West-end church, conceded his iemarks with the following : —“ The faces are rather good, and the clothing isn’t bad on the whole; but don’t you think the artist shows great poverty of invention in putting straw hats, exactly alike, on the whole five?”—the straw hats aiiuded to being the yellow aureoles or glories with which the heads of saints are surrounded. Eccentricity in selecting texts.—A certain preacher, who affected oddity, having become a candidate for some lectui eship, and being required to preach a sermon to prove his fitness for the office, took for his text the word “But.” lie thence drew the doctrine that no lot is without its trial or cross. Naaman was a mighty man, but he was a leper. —The cities of the plain were as fruitful as the garden of the Lord, but the men of Sodom were sinners before the Lord exceedingly. The inhabitants of Ai thought they had put the Israelites fo flight, but they wist not than an ambuscade was laid for them, &c., <tc. When the divine came down fiom the pulpit, flushed very likely with anticipations of success, he was met with the appropriate observation, “ Sir, it was a most ingenious sermon, but you are not the lecturer that will do for us.”

Explorations recently begun and still iu Active prosecution indicate that the little frequented district of Holderness, in Yorkahire, England, may yet become celebrated for its exhumed lake dwellings and their relics. The district was undoubtedly once characterised by numerous lakes, but the sole water space now remaining is Hornsea Mere, a broad sheet more than a mile in length. Relics of lake dwellings have hitherto been sought without marked success in England and the present discoveries are regarded with great interest by archeeologiats. The Leeds Festival opened with a grand performance of Mendelssohn’s “Elijah.” The tickets were all purchased long before, and hundreds more might have been sold. The chorus is described “in quality of tone superb, in attack prompt, and in crispness and unity of expression simply marvellous.” Of this, the greatest oratorio of modern days, one critic remarks:—“Use does nothing to diminish the power of * Elijah,’ and the point of familiarity where contempt begins cannot be made out ahead by even the Strongest glass.” The details of the performance make pulses throb and regrets increase for our art-famine in the colonies. Gray’s elegv, set to music, has apparently disappointed the musical public.