Short as the book is, it is longer than most collections of isolated thoughts of the same kind, except those which are made up, confessedly or unconfessedly, partly of original matter, but principally of what has been borrowed from various sources. Perhaps, it is quite long enough, for an experiment. Again, when a man has been stating his own opinions, and calling his own witnesses through two hundred pages or more, he ought to be very well content to resign the chair and stand before the bar upon his trial.

My motto, which ought scarcely to need explaining, is taken from the sallies of the flying-fish into air and sunshine, perhaps occasionally into mist, short in duration, and uncertain in direction. I hope I may not resemble it in another point, that of having foes in both elements-the lower and the upper-in fact, more adversaries than admirers.*

* I have always hitherto been fairly criticised, with one exception, which I will mention, less to expose the critic than to amuse the reader with a fine specimen of the criticism of the nineteenth century. After a short tirade of abuse without reasons, the critic ends with call-. ing me excessively ignorant, because I did not know how

even to spell Mr. Dickens's nom de guerre-" Boz." The book which I had alluded to was, “Bos” (on the Greek Ellipsis), a work known, by name at least, to every scholar, and coupled in the text with " Eschylus," "Livy," &c., but of which the reviewer had probably never heard. It is rather hard to have one's head broken for another man's ignorance. I wonder the critic did not say that my penmanship had never extended so far as the last letter of the alphabet.

W

EAK and ignorant people are fond of overwhelming us with the wonderful and shocking. They either find, or surmise that they are not able to act upon our intellect, so they try to act upon our feelings. This power they have, and they are sometimes ready to give us any amount of pain, rather than not exercise it.

THOSE Who, from the desire of our perfection, have the keenest eye for our faults, generally compensate for it by taking a higher view of our merits than we deserve.

It is vain to be always looking towards the future, and never acting towards it.

THE tendency of old age, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant, to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified.

B

"DE mortuis nil nisi bonum."

"Say nothing

but what is good, of the dead." But it is better to give the dead their due, both for evil and for good, than to follow the common practice of taking our examples of good from the dead, and of evil from the living.

I find that a passage somewhat similar occurs in Herbert Croft's Life of Dr. Young; not however, I think, so similar as to render the obliteration of mine necessary.

WHEN a generous man is compelled to give a refusal, he generally gives it with a worse grace than the ungenerous; first, because it is against his nature; and secondly, because it is out of his practice.

NEVER show the sore places of your heart, or the weak points of your character, if you can help it, except to a true gentleman-he will treat them generously; others will try friction, if they owe you a grudge, and sometimes from mere native love of mischief.

Avez-vous un secret important, versez le hardiment dans ce noble cœur votre affaire devient la sienne par la confiance.-BOSSUET, Oraison funèbre de Louis de Bourbon.

MEN become wiser in almost all respects after forty, except in those love-affairs in which they are themselves concerned.

THERE is scarcely a man who is not conscious of the benefits which his own mind has received from the performance of single acts of benevolence. How strange that so few of us try a course of the same medicine !

It is probably more innocent to laugh at a theatre at the foibles of imaginary characters, than to find pleasure in ridiculing, at a tea-table, the weaknesses of real ones.

THERE have been endless disputes about the distinction between pride and vanity. One fact is sufficient to show the vastness of the difference. Many men are almost pleased to be called proud. You can call no man vain without insulting him.

Another surely sufficient distinction is, that the former is one of the principal guardians of women, and the latter one of their most frequent betrayers.

WE should remember that it is quite as much a part of friendship to be delicate in its demands, as to be ample in its performances.

It is useless to wonder why the ignorant and the dull do not try to improve themselves by reading. A man must have a certain amount of sense in his head already, to make him desire to put more into it.