which has a perpetual tendency to force them together, they seem to struggle by mutual repulsion: this is not a fancy but a fact.

ALL the "gnomes" or sententious passages of Milton are most sensible, and expressed with the greatest grandeur, dignity, and precision; but, compared with many of those of Shakespeare, they are merely on the surface. He is still further below Shakespeare in the wide, rapid range and infinite variety of his metaphorical language.

A MAN may love a woman so deeply and so passionately, he may be so abundantly satisfied with her, as only to desire offspring from a wish to see her, and love her, in one more light—that of mother.

WE are sometimes, though unreasonably of course, almost sickened with education and its effects, from the number of minds which it produces that can learn, arrange, comprehend, and remember everything; but can neither feel nor originate.

*

SISMONDI, the French historian, tells us that a body of German crusaders, under Godescalc, put themselves under the guidance of a goose, which

was, as they believed, sent from heaven to march before them to the Holy Land. After this, no minister need despair of gathering a congregation, However, I am sorry to find that the historian says very few of these crusaders indeed reached their destination; he tells us nothing whatever of the fate of the goose.

THERE are many minds which resemble a white mouse in a turnabout cage, eternally active, but in a small circle, and to no purpose, but to display their activity.

THERE are others all coolness and calculation, like London milk, a mixture of brains and cold water.

AND whilst talking of brain, there are others again who, having had, perhaps, a tendency to water on the brain in their childhood, have been diligently correcting it with some stronger fluid ever sinee.

*

THERE are few things that have worked more in favour of really great authors than colonization. Conceive the increasing attachment of the intelligent colonist, in the back settlements, for his Shakespeare, and the few good books which he has thought it worth while to carry with him into his solitude,

his thorough acquaintance with them, and the honour with which he transmits them to his children.

OUR real sympathies are terribly confined to our own classes. I have known an individual moved almost to tears at the idea of a gentleman being reduced to live on two hundred a year, but who had not an emotion, (though he may have had five shillings,) to spare for a labourer living on seven shillings a week. And I have known a lady with a smiling progeny of six, who could not conceive what female servants could possibly want with followers.

THERE are some of the gentler sex who have quite a passion for considering as invalids, and trying to treat as such, even the most robust specimens of the other. This arises chiefly from a love of exercising female tenderness and kindness; and a little, perhaps, from a fancy for seeing or imagining the stronger in a state of dependence and submission.

*

THE desire for the marriage of our acquaintances is very often nothing more than the itch of curiosity for seeing people in a new position, whom we are tired of seeing in their old one, and of scrutinizing their conduct in it.

IF a woman could have a child as pure as a cherub, I believe she would infinitely prefer one with all the natural infirmities of the nursery.

NEW similes are good both for new truths and old ones; they help to make the former comprehensible, and the latter endurable.

Bacon says, in the Interpretation of Nature," There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge but by similitude;" and, elsewhere, "New truths must pray in aid of similitudes."

A WOMAN, in spite of a very common assertion, does not like a rake because he is one, unless she has, secretly, the elements of a rake in herself; but there are very few women who do not like some of the common qualities of a rake—ardour, manliness of person, politeness, confidence, a dazzling knowledge of the world, and an elegant flattery. It is not in nature that a woman, as usually constituted, should not have a leaning to these masculine characteristics; though, accidentally, she may have reasons for giving preference to others.

Richardson would naturally have expected that women should take the part of Clarissa, rather than Lovelace; but to his utter astonishment every day's post brought him letters from women entreating the final happiness of the good Lovelace.-JEAN PAUL RICHTER'S Levana.

THE scholar is, in many societies, almost condemned to silence, when the possessor of any other kind of knowledge is courted to display it. Almost any ostentation is forgiven sooner than that of scholarship. Men will often bear the parade of wealth, for they seem, for the time, to participate in the grandeur of their associate; they will applaud a wit, because his sallies tickle their fancy, and flatter their powers of perception; they will listen attentively to a protrusive display of general knowledge, because it gratifies even ignorant curiosity, and implies, perhaps, little more than the labour of collecting facts, which every one thinks he might gather if he would give himself the trouble: but it is not so with thorough scholarship-not, perhaps, that the scholar would wish it to be otherwise.

THE Frenchman has generally both more prudence and more self-command than the Englishman up to a certain point of excitement, beyond which he loses himself altogether. He is, as a rule, far more polite than the Englishman; but, where a Frenchman is unpolite, he is extremely so, because he is unpolite in spite of his earliest instructions, and almost universal example. Frenchmen accept at once, and with acclamation, a generous idea, though they are often inconstant to it through versatility. The English, as a body, do not admit a noble pub