23 MAY 1829, Page 12

GLEANINGS.

In the reign of Frauds the First, King of France, Jews and Arabs were the most renowned professors of medicine, and the vulgar notions had so confounded their knowledge with their religion that unless they professed the faith of their several relations they were not relied on. When Francis I. was suffering under a danger- ous illness at Comimigne, in 1538, he requested the Emperor to send him front Spain a celebrated Jewish physician. When the medical professor arrived, he turned out to be a converted Jew ; and was so well satisfied with the change of his religion, that he boasted of it to the King. Francis was convinced that in order to he effectually cured he must have the aid of a real Jew, and he therefore dis- missed the convert, and sent to Constantinople for an Israelite who adhered to the faith of his fathers. The Jew came and cured him, but it was by a remedy which might have been prescribed with equal effect by a Christian : he simply told the King to drink ass's milk.- kre and Times of Francis the First.

VANITY OF Aurnons.-The following amusing exhibition of authorial vanity has recently appeared in the Salzburg Journal. " The celebrated traveller, M. Sieber, is now at Vienna, revising for the third time his great dramatic poem, in five part, called Die Burgsehaft (The Surety), and composed after Schiller's well-known ballad of the same name, previously to its publication. In this drama, the time is chosen when Plato, (who has never before been brought upon the stage by any poet), is received with 'the greatest honours at the Court of Dionysius at Syracuse. The central point is the character of Thetis, the beau ideal of female excellence. It has besides seven principal characters, and sixty speaking persons, &e. M. Sieher, after many years rigid examination, declares his poem to be the dramatic counterpart of the Iliad ! and asks for it 3000 gold ducats, which, however, he does not require to be paid till they shall be publicly adjudged to him by eight of the most celebrated dramatic writers and critics of Germany, viz. Goethe, Oehlenschliger, Miillner, Raupach, Houwald, Fred. Schlegel (now dead), West, and Grillparzer. On the other hand, if this drama is not unanimously pronounced by all these gentlemen to be the worthy companion to the Iliad. he renounces beforehand every kind of remuneration. About the end of March or the middle of April it will 'be ready for the press. Booksellers who intend to be- come competitors may easily make such conditions without binding themselves." --Foreign Quarterly Review.

SECRET INVENTIONS IN ENGLAND.-The most valuable inventions and improve- ments in the arts in England are not such as meet the public eye. There is too much clashing of interest, too great competition among the manufacturers to allow of this, and the jealousy with which they regard each other extends in a stronger degree to foreigners. Strangers, therefore, who feel the superiorityof England, and while seeing the effects of our national industry, ed.imate the means of their production by published accounts, invariably overrate our artisans or undervalue our engi- neers-the former for executing so much with what are described as not the most perfect apparatus, the latter for apparent neglect or ignorance of the support which science affords to every branch of art. M. Dupin, from personal experience, judged more correctly. M. Peclet does not run into either extreme ; he speaks highly of the great English establishments; regards, for example, with astonishment the Scotch distilleries, where by employing alembics about forty-four inches in diame- ter and five inches in depth. or from fifty-two to fifty-four inches in diameter and about eight inches in depth, their contents, forty-four and eighty gallons respec- tively, are heated, completely distilled, and the alembics refilled, the first in two minutes and a half, the last in three minutes and a half ; but he seems to think that theoretical refinements are too much overlooked. Now it is precisely in these details that wholesale operators vie with each other, and it is these secrets which would be, and arc, most jealously guarded from every eye. The consequence is, that books on practical subjects are necessarily in arrear-the initiated will not speak, the uninitiated are unable to do so.-Foreign Quarterly Review.