"Painfully recollecting the very words that they spoke."-EMERSON.

He professes to despise the remembrance of the formula of a truth, or idea, which its first enunciators gave it. We prefer the maker's mark, the old wine in the old bottle. The second version is rarely so good as An old idea modernised is like, if we may be excused the

the first. jingle,

"A child changed at nurse

Very much for the worse."

And whilst speaking of changelings, by the by, how often does our thought, which has pleased us to-day, look like a fairy-substituted elf tomorrow; or like the apple which the child in Ariosto puts into the closet, and, to his horror, finds half withered and decayed a day or two after!

"Fontaine and Chaucer, dying, wished unwrote
The sprightliest efforts of their wanton thought.
Does lucre, then,

The sacred thirst for gold, betray your pen?"

YOUNG, Epistles.

Or I will take, perhaps, a better motto, from the same author's tragedy of the Revenge:

"To wade through ways obscene, my honour bend,

And shock my nature to obtain my end."

A clever man, who makes his intellect unworthily pander to the animal, for the sake of the market, reminds us of the Maori women, whom Marie Giovanni describes in her travels as suckling young swine, because pigs pay better than babies.

"It never enters the lady's head that the wet nurse's baby probably dies." -HARRIET MARTINEAU, Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft.

Some people are so busy cherishing the ideas of other people, that they give scarcely any chance to their own. Not that this is by any means the prevalent fault of our own day, in which so many men, from ignorance rather than vanity, repeat what their betters have said before them, and boast of their work, as the little boy did when he carried his wooden boat to his grandfather, that they have made it all "out of their own head."

"Era un papagallo instrutto,

Lo sapea mal', ma sapea un po di tutto."-GUADAGNOLI. Smatterers and busybodies are like those little country grocers who will have a venture in every thing. As an old act of Henry IV. says, "Nommez grossers, parcequ'ils engrossent totes manières de marchandises vendables."-Heads worthy of a Chapeau de Robin.

When we are masters of a subject, especially if it lies a little out of the way, we have a natural tendency to fancy ourselves monopolists of it; hence our indulgent surprise at, and frequent over-estimate of, those who know ever so little of that of which we ourselves know a good deal.

""Tis not my only,-I have better still,

And what you see is but my deshabille."-POPE.

Proud men will never point, if they can help it, to the limit of what they can do, because it is next to the commencement of what they can't. This is the history of the ridiculous and ruinous non-reading affectation at our universities and vain men, when they think they are showing their speed, are often only showing the length of their tether.

"If his head was broke by a chairman, or his pocket picked by a sharper, he consoled himself by imitating the Hibernian dialect of the one, or the more fashionable cant of the other."-GOLDSMITH, Essay on Happiness.

If a plagiarist's scissors are at your books, thank your stars that they are not at your watch-chain.

"Nothing is so plain

But may be witty, if thou hast the vein."-HERBERT. "Wit is of the true Pierian spring,

That can make any thing of any thing."-CHAPMAN.

The finest Bordeaux is grown in the flintiest soil, and the water-melon often swells and ripens in the arid sand. Though they are not blessed with the "fatness of the earth," they have a more than ordinary power of attracting the "dews of heaven."

"Tant de talents inutiles, tant de génie sans usage."-ST. SIMON. The talents of some persons are dangerous; of some, useless. They are like glorious fruits ripening and rotting over precipices.

"The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard ; and he that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle, wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace."-DR. JOHNSON, Rambler.

"Suum cuique," and it would be an unwise thing, in the long-run, to interfere with individual tastes; but still one may perhaps be permitted

VOL. V.

R

to wonder at them. For instance, many a one might make himself, or perhaps rather herself, familiar with a general sketch of the history of the Christian Church, in the time devoted to four or five biographies of interesting juvenile members of that Church; and when a man has only an hour or two a day to spare for reading, it seems odd that he should prefer to give them rather to the history of insects than the history of empires.

I once saw a Bible that had belonged to a very good but a very weak person. The practical, the poetical, the doctrinal passages, appeared to have excited no remark or attention whatever; but double pencil-marks of emphasis were scored along such passages as this, "and Job answered and said."

One is also reminded of that circulating-library arrangement, which allows you professedly the same length of time for the perusal of the thickest and deepest books, and the thinnest and shallowest ones; for a volume of Livingstone or John Stuart Mill, and for a Scamper through Scandinavia, by Wideawake, or The Stickleback of the Stone Bottle, pleasing to the petit naturaliste, or the Hippopotamus Hunt, by Stunner (Stunner being Smith, whose only hunt has been in volumes of African travel, under the stimulus of strong brandy-and-water, for the sake of the "fast" reader).

"But by some object every brain is stirred:
The dull may waken to a humming-bird;
The most recluse, discreetly opened, find
Congenial matter in the cockle kind;
And minds, in metaphysics at a loss,
May wander in a wilderness of moss."

"Multa Dircæum levat aura cycnum,
Tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
Nubium tractus."-HORACE.

Genius, without the wind of excitement, often, to use the expressive words of Sir Philip Sydney on the heron, "rises upon its waggling wings with pain." It requires the gale and the wide scope of ether, and makes large circuits of doubt before it strikes out upon its course, or descends upon its quarry. The cock-robin is on its wing and at its worm in an instant.

"Un rayon fait briller la goutte qu'il essuie."-LAMARTINE, Jocelyn. Just as wine often does to genius, making it sparkle and burn,-and

burn out.

Among the various powers of the understanding, there is none which has been so attentively examined by philosophers, or concerning which so many important facts and observations have been collected, as memory."-Dugald STEWART.

But there is one light in which the value and importance of memory has been far too little regarded, viz. as an index of the aptitudes. If you

want to find out what subjects will best repay your studies, you have chiefly to observe what you remember best.

"Using the plausibility of large and indefinite words to defend himself at such a distance as may hinder the eye of common judgment from all distinct view and examination of his reasoning."-MILTON, Eckonoclastes.

Of the two, give us the narrow-minded man, who fancies that he severely reasons with Aristotle, rather than the muddle-brained one, who conceives that he sublimely speculates with Plato.

"Hu the Strong led the nation of the Kymry through the Hazy or German Ocean into Britain."-Welsh Triad, quoted by SHARon Turner.

It is astonishing how much of this fog the Saxon Germans must have shaken off when they landed in Britain, and how much they left behind them on the other side.

"Thou to assenting Reason givest again

Her own enlightened thoughts."-THOMSON.

What a masterly exposition of one of the main aims of the journalist, shading and modifying, or illustrating and fixing, the ideas of most of his daily readers. Expression is his grand object, and he knows it. much knowledge of his subject may even bother a journalist, as Boucher the painter said that "Nature put him out." His allusions to past history must generally be in some measure trite, that they may be recognised, and not act as non-conductors. His moral reflections should be lively, and not of such depth as to invite to reverie. It will not be the best quotation possible, but one of the old familiar ones, that will tell the most on the average reader; and, for a passing allusion, the dear old Pickwick is safer than even Sir Roger de Coverley. The writer of leaders has the double task of consulting the depth of the multitude of average readers and his own, though no doubt in many cases there is no great difference between the two. I refer only to those very ready journalists who resemble a celebrated Irish saint, who could see to write and read by the light of his own radiant fingers, not requiring illumination from any more distant source.

"We confound

Knowledge with knowledge; oh, I am in a mist."-WEBSTER.

Manifold knowledge may be possessed in three ways: blended vitally, packed in orderly and separate parcels, or entangled confusedly. In the last case only is it perplexing to a man himself, and useless or distressing to his friends.

"What time he brushed the dew with hasty pace,
To meet the printer's devlet face to face,

With dogs black lettered."

MATTHIAS, Pursuits of Literature.

Our generation reads a good deal by scent, and its pursuit is mainly divided between the damp odour of the printing-press and the dry one of the dust of record-offices. It has rather too little taste for the calf of a hundred years back, the strong sterling middle-age literature of England, though its authors are occasionally reëdited, partly for a minimum ' of sincere readers, partly because they look respectable in a library, and partly as pegs to hang literary, or rather personal, gossip upon; for there are many of our old worthies of whom every thing is known and caught up-except the contents of their works.

It is, however, highly probable, in an age so extremely anxious as ours is, to walk backwards and forwards at the same time, that a reaction will set in in favour of these writers (as one did for the Elizabethan dramatists in Lamb's time), from Dryden to Cowper inclusive; extending, however, only to the higher class of readers, who can appreciate the strong sense and consummate finish and force of diction, as compared with the mingled slovenliness and mistiness of much of our rapid writing.

The complaint made above is not limited to England. The higher French critics lament the same neglect in France. "Les vrais classiques, les vrais, dont le culte se perd de jour en jour," says Pontmartin, in his review of De Sacy; and St. Beuve, in his recent work on "Chateaubriand and his contemporary group," I find constantly harping on the same string.

ERIC.