sense of the success which had already been obtained. He was now left alone, when suddenly a cry was heard on the deck that the Orient was on fire. In the confusion he found his way up, unassisted and unnoticed,

and, to the astonishment of every one, appeared on the quarter-deck, while he immediately gave orders that boats should be sent to the relief of the enemy.

5. It was soon after nine that the fire on board the Orient broke out. Brueys was dead; he had received. three wounds, yet would not leave his post; a fourth cut him almost in two. He desired not to be carried below, but to be left to die upon deck. The flames soon mastered his ship.

Her sides had just been

painted, and the oil-jars and paint-buckets were lying on the deck. By the prodigious light of this conflagration the situation of the two fleets could now be perceived, the colours of both being clearly distinguishable. About ten o'clock the ship blew up, with a shock which was felt to the very bottom of every vessel. Many of her officers and men jumped overboard, some clinging to the spars and pieces of wreck with which the sea was strewn, others swimming to escape from the destruction which they momently dreaded. Some were picked up by our boats, and some even in the heat and fury of the action were dragged into the lower ports of the nearest British ships by the British sailors. The greater part of her crew, however, stood the danger till the last, and continued to fire from the lower deck.

6. This tremendous explosion was followed by a silence not less awful. The firing immediately ceased on both sides, and the first sound which broke the silence was the dash of her shattered masts and yards falling into the water from the vast height to which they had been exploded. It is upon record that a battle between two armies was once broken off by an earthquake: such an event would be felt like a miracle; but no incident in war, produced by human means, has ever equalled the sublimity of this pause and all its circumstances.

7. About seventy of the Orient's crew were saved by the English boats. Among the many hundreds who perished were the commodore, Casabianca, and his son, a brave boy only ten years old. They were seen floating on a shattered mast when the ship blew up.

Robert Southey.

com-mence'-ment Min'-o-taur Or'-i-ent

se-vere'-ly

as-sist'-ance con-fu'-sion

ceased
ex-plod'-ed

pos-ses'-sion

sur'-geon

re-quest'-ed a-ston'-ish-ment mir'-a-cle

sec-re-tar-y im-me'-di-ate-ly cir'-cum-stan-ces

EXERCISES.-1. The Greek prefix (1) dia- means through; as diameter, the measure through. (2) En- or -em means on, in; as emphasise, to lay stress on; energy, inherent power of doing work.

2. Analyse and parse the following: 'When he was carried down, the surgeon, with a natural and pardonable eagerness, quitted the poor fellow then under his hands, that he might instantly attend the admiral.'

3. Make sentences of your own, and use in each one or more of the following words: Mortal, entreat, incident, commodore.

PROGRESS OF CIVILISATION.

[This is an extract from the well-known History of England from the Accession of James II., by Lord Macaulay, historian and essayist.]

1. Of the blessings which civilisation and philosophy bring with them, a large proportion is common to all ranks, and would, if withdrawn, be missed as painfully by the labourer as by the peer. The market-place, which the rustic can now reach with his cart in an

hour, was, a hundred and sixty years ago, a day's journey from him. The street, which now affords to the artisan, during the whole night, a secure, a convenient, and a brilliantly-lighted walk, was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so dark after sunset that he would not have been able to see his hand, so ill paved that he would have run constant risk of breaking his neck, and so ill watched that he would have been in imminent danger of being knocked down and plundered of his small earnings.

2. Every bricklayer who falls from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by a carriage, now may have his wounds dressed and his limbs set with a skill such as, a hundred and sixty years ago, all the wealth of a great lord, or of a merchant-prince, could not have purchased.

3. Some frightful diseases have been extirpated by science, and some have been banished by police. The term of human life has been lengthened over the whole kingdom, and especially in the towns. The year 1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 more than one in twenty-three of the inhabitants of the capital died. At present only one inhabitant of the capital in forty dies annually. The difference in salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century and the London of the seventeenth century is very far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary season and London in the cholera.

4. Still more important is the benefit which all orders of society, and especially the lower orders, have derived from the mollifying influence of civilisation on the national character. The groundwork of that character has indeed been the same through many generations, in the sense in which the groundwork of

the character of an individual may be said to be the same, when he is a rude and thoughtless schoolboy and when he is a refined and accomplished man. It is pleasing to reflect that the public mind of England has softened while it has ripened, and that we have, in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a kinder people. There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity.

5. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient than at present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants.

6. A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled horse or an overdriven ox. Fights, compared with which a boxing-match is a refined and humane spectacle, were among the favourite diversions of a large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost a finger or an eye.

7. The prisons were seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes, the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked with profound indifference.

8. Nowhere could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which, in our time, pries into the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship, which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken