On Wednesday afternoon M. Desbarolles, the celebrated French writer on
the hand and its various expressive lines and features, gave a lecture on the hand at the Hanover Square Rooms, which was attended by only about a dozen. people,—Englishmen thinking that half a guinea was a good deal to pay in order to hear about the lines of the hand. The lecture was unfortunately delivered neither in French nor English, but in English so im- perfectly articulated by a Frenchman as to be very tedious, and only recapitulated the great doctrines some account of which we recently gave to our readers out of the book on- psychomany of a Fellow of the Royal Society, Mr. Beamish, the biogra- pher of Sir Isambard Brunel. Our chief interest therefore was in testing the application of those principles. M. Desbarolles was good enough to examine the hands of his audience after the lecture, when amongst the most definite of his diagnoses he attributed to the present writer great musical and artistic gifts, and special manual and mechanical dexterity likely to be shown in sculpture. As the unfortunate subject of his criticism never could catch a tune correctly, spent many painful and useless hours in his school years in trying to draw upright houses, and generally never succeeded in using his hands with efficiency for the simplest purpose, it sounded a little like irony, and the comfortable pro- phecy of " une belle chance" and considerable wealth looming in the immediate future, was leas consolatory than it otherwise might have been.
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