caves of Pommery, where Madame Pommery kindly permitted the visitors to make practical test of the quality of her celebrated produce." I have not seen the report in which is embodied the results of this practical testing, which, if properly written, should begin and end with "Hip, hip, hurrah!" If not, the French savans are not yet on a level with the red lions of our British Association. MY A PERFORATED MOUNTAIN. Y old friend Torghatten was lately introduced to the British. Association at Swansea by Professor W. J. Sollas. It is an insular granitic rock, one of the thousands of such islands that fringe the cost of Scandinavia. It is situated a few miles south of the Arctic circle, and composed of stratified granite or "gneiss." When seen at a distance from the south, it is remarkably like a round-topped broadrimmed hat. It is 824 feet high, and pierced with a very curious natural tunnel 530 feet long (Professor Sollas says 600, but this is wrong). This tunnel is 250 feet high at its western entrance, 66 feet high at its eastern entrance, and about 200 feet high in the middle. The floor slopes downwards from east to west, being 470 feet above the sea-level on the east side, and 400 feet on the west. As the passenger packet passes on the east side, the daylight is seen fairly through the mountain. Professor Sollas attributes its origin to mechanical disintegration aided by joints. When I first visited this region in 1856, but little was known of this remarkable perforated mountain, beyond what could be seen in passing. I then ventured to suggest an explanation of its origin, which the accurate measurements subsequently made by Norwegian surveyors help to confirm. Torghatten stands out a short distance from the mainland of Norway, and to the west of it, of course. Every valley opening up on this coast is more or less terraced, and these terraces indicate a former submergence of this part of Scandinavia in varying degrees, the maximum reaching about 600 feet. By eye measurement at the time, I estimated the height of this tunnel at about 600 feet, and thus concluded that once upon a time the waves dashed against that part of the rock and battered out this tunnel as one of those ordinary sea-caves that abound on every rocky coast where the material of the rock varies in hardness or friability. I was not then aware of the difference between the height of the east and west opening, only having seen it from the east. The fact that the west side of the tunnel, which is exposed to the open sea, is about four times as high as the east mouth, confirms my theory, seeing that all the well-known sea caverns of this kind on our own and other coasts have similar proportions in relation to their sea and inland extremities. The down slope of the floor corresponds in like manner, the west side being 70 feet lower than the east. Besides this, the maximum height of the cavern corresponds remarkably with the height of the highest terraces, being 650 feet against their 600. The additional 50 feet is accounted for by the height of roof above sea-level, and the subsequent falling of the roof, as shown by blocks now lying on the floor. Such a cavern, started at the time of maximum submersion, would have its floor lowered as the land rose above the sea when they formed the lower terraces that abound in the valleys. The "joints" described by Professor Sollas undoubtedly exist, and mechanical disintegration has taken place since the original excavation of the tunnel. This is proved by the blocks that have fallen from the roof and now cumber the floor, just as the boulders lie on the floor of a cavern under Dunluce Castle, which only differs in being now at the sea-level. On a subsequent visit nineteen years later, I observed several abortive attempts at similar caverns on the rocks of the neighbourhood, that is, hollows which overhang on the face of the cliffs, where joints and the mechanical disintegration described by Sollas were exhibited. But mere mechanical disintegration, and consequent falling of rock, cannot excavate a long tunnel. Horizontal traction, as well as vertical fall, is required. The material separated by the joints must be carried away from one end to the other-530 feet, in this case; or, at least, from the middle to each end-265 feet in each direction. The only agents we know capable of doing this with granite rock or pseudo-stratified gneiss are the sea-waves or a torrent river. Such caverns abound inland in limestone, but these are due to the solvent action of water containing carbonic acid. It has no such action on gneissic or other similar metamorphic rocks, while every seacoast formed of such rocks exhibits more or less of such perforation by the waves. St. Katherine's Rock, at Tenby, is an insular mass perforated by a tunnel closely resembling Torghatten; the cliffs of Mohir on the Irish coast, and the whole face of the serpentine formation of Cornwall about the Lizard, abound with such tunnels, arches, sea-caverns, &c., all visibly done by the waves hammering out the softer portions of the rock. But an ancient sea-cavern upraised some 600 feet above the present sea-level is a rare phenomenon, and nobody need wonder that it is the subject of strange legends, such as one that I have narrated in "Through Norway with a Knapsack." W, MATTIEU WILLIAMS. TH TABLE TALK. HE stage in England has never been, as it is in France, a school of language, and its authority with regard to pronunciation or accent is far from being accepted as important, still less as final. Until recently, however, it has not been regarded as absolutely misleading, and those who would not dream of referring a student to the pronunciation adopted by actors would not, at least, think of cautioning him against it. It seems as if the moderate amount of credit hitherto assigned the stage in this respect will shortly have to be withdrawn. If nothing is done to teach a young actor his art, if he is allowed to scramble on to the stage with no preliminary practice in the country under the supervision of those who will correct with rebuke or ridicule flagrant vices of style, and if he is allowed to alter at will the words assigned him, the result cannot be other than fatal to the claim of acting to rank as art. At the present moment there is not one actor in a score able to pronounce half a dozen lines of verse without committing some egregious blunder, or without marring or in some wise altering the text. The most common form of error arises from the insertion of accent where none is requisite. Very sparing indeed in its employment of accent is our language. In not one sentence in fifty is any form of special emphasis required. An actor now not seldom supplies a misplaced accent, or a ridiculous emphasis, and flatters himself he is giving us a new reading. Let one who wishes to judge of this subject take the play of Hamlet: I am not speaking from the book, but I doubt whether there are a dozen cases in all, in the acting edition of Hamlet, in which there is any need for decided emphasis. The only cases I recall occur in the closet scene, wherein Hamlet responds to his mother's statement, "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended," with the rebuke, "Mother, you have my father much offended." Here the emphasis upon the word "you" can scarcely be too strong, since the responsibility and the guilt are at once shifted from the shoulders of Hamlet to those of Gertrude. In the following lines, the opposition between "an idle tongue" and "a wicked tongue" may also be marked in a similar fashion. In an average performance of Hamlet, meanwhile, there are some scores of misreadings, the whole of which spring from the attempt to place accent or emphasis where none is required. The old joke concerning the exponent of Ratcliff in Richard III., who, in answer to the King's question, announced himself, "My lord, 'tis I, the early village cock," depends, of course, upon wrong punctuation. Errors equally extravagant, though different in origin, are, however, now common on the stage, and I do not exaggerate in saying that there are few of our younger actors, male or female, who do not frequently destroy the meaning of the words assigned them. Strong measures are necessary to remedy this evil, and, if such are not taken, our stage will come under a reproach of ignorance and perversity, and will incur the contempt of all men of education. I AM glad to see that the anonymous complaint of Dr. Howard Furness, which I was the first to strengthen with the authority of his name, concerning the manner in which the Tower is shown to strangers, seems likely to bear fruit. With the approval of the Secretary of State for War, the Constable of the Tower has appointed a committee to investigate the objects of interest in that building, and to frame regulations for the future admission of visitors. This seems like a direct answer to the appeal, and doubtless is such. In constitution the committee is all that can be required; it is only to be hoped that the rules of red tape will be relaxed, and that its hands will not be hampered. MR R. DOBSON'S volume of "Literary Frivolities,” which constitutes the latest addition to the Mayfair Library of Messrs. Chatto & Windus, is an absolutely delightful companion for an unoccupied half-hour. It is a book which may with equal pleasure be read all through or dipped into at any point, and the collection of literary triflings it supplies is admirably ample. No work of this kind is likely to claim completeness, and there are one or two instances of the forms of frivolity he describes which Mr. Dobson will do well to include in his next edition. It is difficult to think of Milton in connection with frivolity. Still, in dealing with monosyllabic verse, and quoting from Hall, Young, Lodge, Herbert, and Shakespeare, Milton should not be forgotten. The lines in which he depicts, by the use of monosyllables, the progress of the fiend through the Boggy Syrtis, neither sea Nor good dry land, which, in order to arrive at the earth, he is compelled to cross, are finely conceived to indicate a journey of this kind: The fiend, O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, Pope seems, in his version of Homer, to have in part imitated these lines, since he translates the famous verses of the Iliad, xxiii. 116— Πολλὰ δ' ἄναντα, κάταντα, πάραντά τε, δόχμιά τ' ἦλθον, etc., intended to describe the roughness of a road O'er hills, o'er dales, o'er crags, o'er rocks they go, Spenser furnishes one or two good instances of monosyllabic verse, to which fact it is probably attributable that Phineas Fletcher, his arch imitator, whom Mr. Dobson quotes, has essayed the same form of art. A COMPANION volume to that Mr. Dobson has supplied might be formed out of the contributions to the newspaper press of recent writers. Among gems have to be counted Jeffrey Prowse's rhymed description of Mentone, which was printed as a column of prose in a daily newspaper, and the imitation of the Laureate's "In Memoriam" which appeared in Punch a dozen or more years ago, in the shape of an advertisement of Ozokerit. The latter is one of the finest parodies ever written. I AM glad to see a recommendation in the Pall Mall Gazette that fountains, such as I mentioned were to be found at most French railway stations, should be constructed in England along our principal lines. One of the most noteworthy sights of a railway journey in France is the crowd at the fountain with the men and women waiting in a queue to fill their bottles or to wash their hands and faces. The erection of drinking-fountains at our railway stations would do more for the cause of temperance than any quantity of closing, Sunday or other, of publichouses. No reason why a scheme of this kind should not be immediately carried out presents itself to me except that it is not punitive enough in its character to commend itself to those who believe in no legislation that is not repressive. Meanwhile, as I am dealing with the question of closing, I will mention that a case came under my notice recently in which a petition in favour of Sunday closing was being passed round a Sunday school and signed by all the children who were old enough to write their names. In his newly puremarkable scholarship, research, and crudition, N his newly-published life of Étienne Dolet, which may claim to Mr. Christie, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Manchester, after |