A General History of Executions for the
year seventeen hundred and thirty, containing
the lives, actions, and dying speeches
of sixty notorious malefactors, executed at
Tyburn and elsewhere; but also for such
weighty subjects as The Divine Catastrophe
of the Kingly House of Stuart, the Crisis
or Impartial Judgment on English Affairs,
and number seventy-eight, volume thirteen,
of Mr. Salmon's interminable Modern
History.

Sylvanus Urban's first number contained
forty-two pages; the number for September,
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight, including
advertisements, some hundred and twenty
pages. Though the vague lines of infancy are
exchanged for the definite forms of mature
age, the individuality is remarkably
preserved. The honest intention "to treasure-up
as in a magazine," papers on the leading
topics of the day, "or at least impartial
abridgments thereof," has been faithfully
adhered to amidst all the changes of more
than a century and a quarter.

Well may the literary centenarian expand
his columns; for he addresses an extended
public. The monthly bill of mortality in
the first number of the Gentleman's Magazine
records sixteen hundred and two births,
and nineteen hundred and nine deaths. The
tables put forth by Sylvanus Urban last
month show that, during the four weeks
which ended with the twenty-fourth of
August there were, in London, four times
more births than the number he recorded in
seventeen hundred and thirty-one, or an
excess equal to the population of a good-
sized village; and, out of the quintupled
population, not very much over double the
number of deaths.

                                           BEYOND.

WE must not doubt, or fear, or dread, that love for
       life is only given,
And that the calm and sainted dead will meet
       estranged and cold in heaven:—
O, love were poor and vain indeed, based on so harsh
       and stern a creed.

True that this earth must pass away, with all the
      starry worlds of light,
With all the glory of the day, and calmer tenderness
      of night;
For, in that radiant home can only shine the immortal
      and divine.

Earth's lower things—her pride, her fame, her science,
learning, wealth, and power—
Slow growths that through long ages came, or fruits of
      some convulsive hour,
Whose very memory must decay—heaven is too pure
      for such as they.

They are complete: their work is done. So let them
       sleep in endless rest.
Love's life is only here begun, nor is, nor can be,
       fully blest;
It has no room to spread its wings, amid this crowd of
       meaner things.

Just for the very shadow thrown upon its sweetness.
       here below,
The cross that it must bear alone, and bloody baptism
       of woe;
Crown'd and completed through its pain, we know
       that it shall rise again.

So if its flame burn pure and bright, here, where our
       air is dark and dense,
And nothing in this world of night lives with a living
       so intense;
When it shall reach its home at length—how bright
       its light! how strong its strength!

And while the vain weak loves of earth (for such
       base counterfeits abound)
Shall perish with what gave them birth—their graves
       are green and fresh around,
No funeral song shall need to rise, for the true Love
       that never dies.

If in my heart I now could fear that, risen again, we
       should not know
What was our Life of Life when here—the hearts we
       loved so much below;
I would arise this very day, and cast so poor a thing
       away.

But Love is no such soulless clod: living, perfected it
       shall rise
Transfigured in the light of God, and giving glory to
       the skies:
And that which makes this life so sweet, shall render
      heaven's joy complete.

                         SAFE HARBOUR.

WE have more than once called attention
to the wreck-chart of these islands, to the
calamities so terrible and so incessant that
have made the British coast a disgrace to a
sea-going people, among whom undoubtedly
there is enough of energy, wealth, science,
and humanity to ensure—when the battle
has been once fairly accepted—conquest of
the destroying giant that lies stretched
across the threshold of their home. Our
seaside holidays are clouded by the thoughts
that sometimes rise beside the melancholy
shore, where there is no fisherman who has
not tales of misery to tell, no visitor who
makes a stay of any length upon one spot,
without seeing a wreck of life or hope in the
destruction of some vessel.

Strongly impressed by a conviction that
these wrecks upon our coast represent, not a
dead fact to be passively regretted, but a
demand for energetic action that our country
is quite competent to meet; and ought to
meet, for mercy's sake, for honour's sake, for
love of its brave mariners; we consider it
to be our duty to assist with all our might in
making public any thought expressed on this
behalf that appears worthy of attention. Mr.
Edward Killwick Calver, of the Royal Navy,
has been thirty years afloat, and is an
Admiralty Surveyor. He has written a pamphlet
On the Construction and Principle of a
Wave Screen, designed for the formation of
Harbours of Refuge, which is evidently the
work of a trained observer.