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The sublime and beautiful are avowedly the province of poetry. Prose, however,—nay, even slang—has its beauties and its mysteries; an inquiry into which is more especially the duty of the prosy of this wicked though rigidly-righteous-seeming world. Dr. Johnson might didacticize whole libraries in exposition of certain familiar phrases, vulgarly supposed to originate with the pot-boys of our enlightened metropolis, which, we suspect, might be traced, with quite as much plausibility as envelops other crotchets of the learned, to the Eleusinian mysteries, or the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone.

To go no further than Coventry! Which of us has not, by word of pen, or word of mouth, perpetrated the phrase of "sending to Coventry?" Which of us has not talked, with apparent potentiality, of sending such and such persons to Coventry?—Now where is Coventry? Who really knows anything of Coventry?— The first gazetteer will readily supply the latitude and longitude of a certain city in the county of Warwick, much famed for the manufacture of members of parliament and silk ribbons; and far more, as the birth-place of the most modest lady and immodest gentleman of feudal times—the Lady Godiva and her peeping Tom,—a legend recently vivified and freshened by the verse of Alfred Tennyson, like the re-florescence of the Glastonbury Thorn!—

But to that Coventry,—that matter-of-fact city of beams and treddles, no one in his senses ever thought of sending a human being, even since the establishment of the railroad, unless his younger brother, to be woven into an M.P. The Coventry to which we send our friends when we begin to treat them as foes,—the Coventry so extensively talked of,—is, on the contrary,

People come back from transportation; people come back from New Zealand; people come back from the North Pole. Captain Ross came back from his voyages; Commander Napier from his campaign; but from Coventry, we protest again—

No one, at least, avows that he was ever expedited on that unseemly tour, for which the world is consequently never likely to be the wiser. The London hotels advertise among their arrivals,—"Mr. Smith and family, from Calcutta!"—"the Rev. John Thompson, from Sierra Leone!" But what confusion would arise from an announcement of "The Marquis of Nithsdale, from Coventry!"—"Lady Louisa Quickfidget, from Coventry?" Nevertheless, as Georgia U. S., and Jersey U. S., serve to distinguish the Georgias and Jerseys of the two hemispheres, "Coventry T. I.," or Terra Incognita, might be made to point out the difference between the city of ribbon-weavers, and the land of mauvais sujets.

In these days of philosophical investigation, learned associations of all sorts and conditions are engrossed by the consideration of much that baffled the wisdom of our ancestors. The Geographical Society no longer admits of our placing

on the downs of Mesopotamia, or the Abyssinian flats; nor does the