From a very pleasant new book, entitled "Shakspeare's England," by G. W. Thornbury, we extract the following passages : -

"The Elizabethan houses are wonderful in their individuality. They seem to share all the hopes and joys, and passions of the builder. They have sunny spots, caves of shadow, bright clear quadrangles, and gloomy corridors. There is no mood in your mind they will not fit. They have about them a calm stately dignity, neither self-conscious nor arrogant. They do not oppress you with a sense of wealth, but greet you like old friends. They are neither flimsy nor tawdry, nor bo massy and dark as to remind you of a workhouse and a gaol. They seem fit for all seasons. They are cool in summer and cheery in winter. The terrace is for June, the porch for December. The bay window is so clear and airy that you could not believe the same house had that red cavern of a fireplace, the very shrine of comfort and warmth, hallowed both by legend and recollection. Alas! that one cannot. order an avenue ready made, that one cannot purchase a genealogy. In these old houses the portraits frown at a mere purchaser as a stranger; the ghosts refuse to leave their churchyard beds to welcome or disturb you, and the very tenants look upon you as an up start and an interloper." * * "The bay window, invented a century before the* Tudor age, was at first simply a projecting opening between two buttresses, generally placed at the end of a room, and occupying the bay of a building.

When placed at the end of a great hall, it reached in a broad crystal sheet from the roof to the floor. It sometimes consisted of nine or ten stages, and at banquets was furnished with shelves of gold and silver plate. The walls were wainscoted with carved oak panels, and these were furnished with cipher mottoes. Elizabethan architecture was intended to please the traveller, the neighbor, and the passer-by. Its inconveniences were that the rooms in street houses were low and dark, the streets narrow and dim".

The following is a lively description of a great house in the time of Shakspeare: -

"Here was a town contained under a single roof, a vast family held within the same walls; all living and hating, and wooing and fighting, within this network of courts, passages, towers, and chambers. Servingmen squabbling in the kitchen; butlers drunk in the cellars; pages stealing in the buttery;- wenches chattering and being kissed in the pastry room; matrons busy in the still room; stewards weighing money in the bursery; gallants duelling in the orchard; lovers meeting on the staircase. Days of romance gone to the grave forever." * * .

"Queen Elizabeth, when visiting Sir Thomas Gresham, remarked that the court should have been divided by a wall. He immediately collected so many artificers, that the wall was erected before the queen had arisen the next morning".

The last paragraph reminds us of the Chinese magnificos, who are said to change the whole of their expensive garden scenes in one night, wood, water, and all, so as to surprise their visitors with an entirely new scene in the morning.

The Patent Office Report is, as usual, filled with useful suggestions, many of which we shall notice, as peculiarly adapted to the readers of this periodical. Mr. D. J. Browne, in his report on " Seeds and Cuttings," gracefully admits that he was in error in stating that the Tamarind grew and fruited in Virginia, his attention being called to the circumstance, in these pages, by our correspondent, Yardley Taylor.