Part 18 (1/2)
The Swiss, or _Geneva_ watches, as they are commonly called, owing to the poverty of the workmen, the employment of women, and the subdivision of labor, which is carried to even a greater extent than with us, sell at a much lower price than those made in England; but an English watch has. .h.i.therto been a desideratum in every part of the world. Here, at present, the term watch-maker is no longer applicable, every portion of the instrument being the work of a different artisan, and the separate parts are often sent hundreds of miles, to meet in the metropolis, and make a whole of excellent workmans.h.i.+p. There are innumerable places in which some branch or other of the manufacture is carried on; but the best movements are made at Prescot, in Lancas.h.i.+re, while the town of Whitchurch, in Hamps.h.i.+re, is employed wholly in making hands. In London, Clerkenwall Green has long been the resort of artificers employed in the various nice and delicate manipulations requisite in the construction of our subject: here, slide-makers, jewellers, motion-makers, wheel-cutters, cap-makers, dial-plate-makers, the painter, the case-maker, the joint-finisher, the pendent-maker, the engraver, the piercer, the escapement-maker, the spring-maker, the chain-maker, the finisher, the gilder, the fusee-cutter, the hand-maker, the gla.s.s-maker, and pendulum spring wire-drawer, are all located; for, owing to the minute division of labor, which tends greatly to facilitate its execution after the movements (which have previously pa.s.sed through thirteen workmen's hands in the provinces) are received in town, the watch progresses through those of these other twenty-one artificers before it comes forth complete.
Owing to this delicate and varied workmans.h.i.+p, materials originally not worth sixpence are frequently converted into watches worth a hundred pounds and more, so costly may their appendages be made. But in all these different branches of a business which maintains thousands of families, the only part of it which falls to women in this country is the polis.h.i.+ng of the cases, which the casemakers' wives are sometimes employed to do.
Perhaps no object of man's ingenuity has been made the exponent of so many grave morals as the _watch_. Poets and philosophers have managed that its beatings should be only a little less gloomy to the imagination than the a.s.sociations of a pa.s.sing bell; but Paley has thrown a glory round this gloom, and aggrandized it from a peevish reminder of pa.s.sing time into a fair argument of a Creator's presence, in the delicate and wonderful machinery of nature, which could no more come by chance than could this little instrument have been formed without a contriver.
What the author of the ”Old Church Clock” has said of that branch of our subject, may be equally applied to this--”there is no dead thing so like a living one.” Day by day, year by year, its iron heart throbs on, some of them surviving, as we have seen, for centuries, though they are said to beat 17,160 times in an hour. Well would it be for us if the time-keeper in our bosoms, beating momently the escape of our allotted term, acted as lightly on the frame; but all its emotions help to wear this out.
In the dawn of its appearance, in an age when every science that set men wondering was in some degree regarded as the work of magic, what a sensation must these ”animated eggs” have occasioned, and how suggestive! unless the fanciful belief of some of the early fathers of the church, who averred that gems and precious metals were first made known to mortals by fallen angels, who also inspired the desire to profit by, and be adorned with them, had any thing to do with the tabooing of evil by holy signatures--how suggestive are the quaint gravings of saints and scriptural subjects on the cover of the watch dug up at Winchester, of the antique custom of inscribing trinkets with sacred symbols, and so converting them into amulets; a custom which the Greeks and Romans borrowed from the Egyptians, and which the early Christians perpetuated after them.
We have seen the watch, originally oval, take an octagon form; after which it subsided into its present shape, the only variation being in size, and degrees of roundness.
At present watches are frequently made not thicker than a crown piece, and yet perform their functions with exactness; nay, there are some with perfect works, compressed into a smaller compa.s.s than a s.h.i.+lling! A friend of the writer's saw one, not long since, set in a ring, the hands and figures being composed of brilliants, upon a dial of blue enamel; and at the recent exhibition one filled the place usually occupied by a seal at the end of a pencil-case, and another appeared as an appendage to a lady's bracelet. There was also a large silver watch, such as mariners are fond of wearing, immersed in a vase of water, and yet impervious to any ill effects.
Our subject is one which grows under our hands, and we might go on _ad libitum_ describing their different idiosyncracies; for watches, like individuals, have their several temperaments and ways of going. We have all met with _fast watches_ and slow ones, and some (a disposition they are apt to contract from their wearers) are very irregular--varieties of character, which so puzzled their first owner, the Emperor Charles V., who amused himself on his retirement to the monastery of St. John, by endeavoring to keep in order these by-gone companions of his dinner-table, that they produced a reflection on the absurdity of his attempts to keep together the powers of Europe, when even these little pieces of mechanism baffled him.
American women have less courtesy than any others in the world. A thousand rules of deference are established by concessions of the other s.e.x, which they enforce with ungracious arrogance, as if they were but recognitions of ”inalienable rights.” This is their offence to all well-bred Europeans.--_Correspondent London Morning Post._
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Sickerness--steady, secure.
From Sharpe's Magazine.
FeTE DAYS AT ST. PETERSBURG.
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF ALEXANDER DUMAS
BY JANE STRICKLAND.
New-Year's day and the Benediction of the Waters provide the inhabitants of St. Petersburg with two great national festivals, in which all cla.s.ses share in the pleasures and devotion of the sovereign. The first is an imperial fete, the second an imposing religious ceremony.
On New-Year's day, in virtue of an old and touching custom by which the Emperor and Empress of Russia are designated by their poorest subjects Father and Mother, these potentates at the commencement of the year receive their children as their own invited guests. Their family being too vast to invite by name, they adopt the simple but efficacious plan of scattering about the streets of their capital twenty-five thousand cards of invitation, indicative that they will be at home to such a number of their children. These cards bear no address, but they give admission to the bearers to the splendid saloons of the Winter Palace without the slightest distinction of rank or wealth.
It was thus that the Emperor Alexander, according to custom, kept the first day of the year 1825, the last he was ever destined to see. The rumor of the conspiracy that embittered the closing months of his life and reign, though it had reached his ears and troubled his repose, did not appear to him any reason for depriving his subjects of their annual visit to their sovereign. From these unknown guests the Russian Autocrat felt a.s.sured he had nothing to fear. With them he was not only popular but adored. He therefore directed the Master of the Police to order no alteration in the usual costume of the male part of the company, whom he was to admit in masks according to custom on these occasions. In the darkest annals of barbarism, despotic sovereigns dreaded and often found the dagger of the a.s.sa.s.sin in the hands of some member of their own family. Civilization, however limited, changes the objects of suspicion to the aristocracy, who are always, under these unfortunate const.i.tutions, of the military profession. Now the want of the counterpoise of the middle cla.s.ses creates this secret but perpetual warfare between the absolute monarch and the n.o.bility--the n.o.bility who in free countries are the natural bulwark of the throne. In Russia the Autocrat is never afraid of the mult.i.tude, with whom he holds a twofold claim to their veneration, as supreme pontiff, or head of the Church, and Czar.
The cards of invitation, being transferable, are, as a matter of course, purchaseable; and among his masked guests who were privileged to shake hands with Alexander, some cowardly a.s.sa.s.sin might take that opportunity to murder the sovereign; yet he, with a firm but touching reliance on G.o.d, ordered at seven o'clock on the New-Year's evening, the gates of the Winter Palace to be thrown open as usual, to his motley company.
No extra precautions were taken by the police; the sentinels were on duty, according to custom, at the palace gates, but the Emperor was without any guards in the interior of the imperial residence, vast as the Tuileries. In the absence of all precaution or even regulations for the behavior of an undisciplined crowd, it was surprising what natural politeness effected. Veneration for the presence of the sovereign was alone sufficient to produce good breeding; there was no pus.h.i.+ng nor striving, nor clamor, and the entrance was made with as little noise as if grat.i.tude for the favor accorded to the guests had induced each to give a precautionary admonition to his neighbor.
While the thronging thousands were gaining admission to his palace, the Emperor Alexander was seated by the Empress in the Hall of St. George in the midst of the imperial family, when the door was opened to the sound of music, for the saloons were filled with his visitors, and a grand _coup d'oeil_ of grandees, peasants, princesses, and grisettes was discerned. At this moment the Emperor advanced and gave his hand to the English, French, Spanish, and Austrian amba.s.sadors, the representatives of their several sovereigns. He then moved alone to the door, that his guests might behold in their sovereign and host the father of his people. It was a moment anarchy was said to have dedicated to his a.s.sa.s.sination, and that parricidal and regicidal act could have been easily effected at such a juncture had it really been in contemplation.
Alexander was no longer in appearance a melancholy and suffering invalid, he looked happy and smiling; and if his smile was counterfeited, he wore the mask ably and well. The instant the Autocrat appeared, the motley group made a forward movement, and then a precipitate retreat. The danger vanished with them. The Emperor regarded the retiring waves of this human sea with imperturbable serenity, a remarkable feature in his character, a moral re-action, which a courageous mind can alone bestow, and which he had shown on several trying occasions. One of these was at a ball given by M. Caulincourt, Duke of Vicenza, the French Amba.s.sador; the other was at a fete at Zakret, near Wilna.
The ball was at its height, when the amba.s.sador was informed that the house was on fire; fearful that the news of the conflagration might occasion more ill consequences than the fire itself, he posted an aide-de-camp at every door, and ordered his people to keep the misfortune a profound secret, after which he communicated the accident in a low voice to the Emperor, and a.s.sured him that no one should be permitted to withdraw till he and the imperial family were in perfect safety; he was going to see the fire extinguished, and he hoped the efforts made to get it under would be successful; adding, that even if a report should circulate in the saloons as to this startling fact, no one would credit it while they saw the Emperor and his family still there.
”Very well, then, I will remain,” coolly remarked the Emperor; and when Caulincourt returned some time after to announce the extinction of the fire, he found the Russian Autocrat dancing a polonaise.