“And I have a house, No. 37, Halcyon Row-with good base ment story-and water laid on to the top. Have I not, Cousin ?" Yes, Cousin."

Miss Meridew bit the knot off her thread; and Strephon had

to begin anew.

“And, Ma'am, I am very anxious to assure you, that since I was a child, I have been always spoken of as obliging, considerate, and as fond of the Ladies' company, as a religious and moral member of society ought to be. Is it not so, Cousin ?

"Yes, Cousin."

"Those are mice in the wainscot, gentlemen, that you hear," observed Miss Meridew.

"Yes, Cousin."-Even those dull people were shaken by a testimonial so grotesque and gratuitous. Both the Strephon and the Amanda broke into a fit of laughter, at the misplaced reply of Mr. Alured Deedes. There was no resuming "the tender subject," that day:—and before that day fortnight, Miss Meridew had bestowed her virtues and her possessions, upon the Reverend Ozias Cockle!" So endeth a wooing!

There is another sort of testimonial of a yet more peculiar quality than the above, worth including in this list of Curiosities of Friendship. An inhabitant of the moon, aware of the very rainy climate of this "terrestrial Ball," or, in other words, of the quantity of tears, which must fall thereon, be the season ever so propitious would conceive himself addressed as a Marine, and not a lunar visitant, were he told that there exists among us a class of persons whose delight it is to conceive themselves mal-treated and evil spoken of. Yet so it is: there are some who keep themselves in a fever of complacency by forgiving imaginary injuries. They know that the basest of motives are imputed to them, but, thank God! they can bear that. They are glad to find persons so good, simple, and credulous, as to believe that themselves have no enemies and who try to persuade them of the same. They wish they did not know better! Somebody is always talking them over behind their backs—or was, before they came into the room! Before they do a given thing, they are sure that they will be misjudged for doing it. They were brought into this world, to suffer calumny-to waste affection-to abide ingratitude. It was sung to them in their cradles." They should be insane to expect any enjoyment, or honest construction!

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People are so ill-natured," used dear Lady to murmur, hanging her head, the while, like a shepherdess." They say, that Sydney Smith and I, wrote Cecil.' And I am told (not having had the honour, Sir, to know the Lady, myself) that she did look teased and "put out," by this sad little dream. We had a gentlewomen of the same family, but more meek—a back quality, who used to keep Halcyon Row, in a perpetual stir, by the imagined ill-usage she had to parry, making a round from house to house, in quest of flatteries and contradictions to reports which no one had circulated; and exasperating my up-right, downright, angry Mrs. Bell,-till I used to think the latter would become demented, if one calamity more overtook Miss Gosse. Never did irreproachable virgin suggest the same number of peccadilloes, which she could only have, by miracle, committed. She had been talked about, with Mr. Vavasour; she had been accused of starving her maid-of-all-work; and of poisoning Mrs. Stagg's four peacocks, (a slight crime, if true: since those birds used to screech all night, to the detriment and distress of the Row). She had sent anonymous letters to three decided Calvinists. She had threatened Howley, the inarticulate old sexton and parish clerk, with the loss of his place. "Did Mrs. Bell believe she was capable of such wicked doings? was the invariable conclusion. The last piece of monstrous self-accusation, however, happily closed our doors against the poor, morbid creature. "What do you

think they are saying of me, now, dear Mrs. Bell?" burst she in, one day, howling and mopping her eyes. "What do you think they say now?-that I drink! Did you ever hear such cruelty? such wickedness ?-Do you believe it?

Yes, Ma'am, and worse, was my helpmate's impatient answer. Up bounced Miss Gosse. She was seen within our gates no more. Turn such a person's play into reality: and, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, you make an enemy for life, by extinguishing them!

The subject widens upon me as I proceed-spreading out into the conviction that there is no fact for which you cannot find an insincere and, stranger still, a sincere witness. Think of the Monument, on which the inheritance of an important estate depended-to the existence of which, in a certain Church, within the memory of man, a number of worshipful parishioners swore, in a well-known trial-whilst as many, equally worshipful, swore as certainly to the fact of such a thing never having existed. Think

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of matters asserted on the hustings !-proved by the plump and plain testimonial of by-standers. Think (as we are there!) of Tests proposed and accepted. Recollect the delicious traditions only waiting the call of Antiquarians with regard to any obscure passage and how A shall cap B's impression till C gets a fact, which he retaileth unblushingly: and D goes the length of challenging scrutiny-whereupon E enters into an inquiry! &c., &c. Reflect how a whimsical idea, referred to twice or thrice, as a pleasant freak of imagination, takes that form and consistency, which prepares you for referring to it a fourth time as something 'you have heard," if not a reality which has passed within the sphere of your own knowledge! And the end will be, if not a mistrust of the testimonials which others command, a reserve in granting them to others—a determination, not to rush out with something which may be true-by way of producing an effect, or strengthening a cause :-but to let no wish to serve, persuade, influence, or other immediate object, blind you to the dry truth, that the Testimonial in which Exaggeration has aught to do, injures three persons-the party recommended, who is encouraged to refrain from progress; the party without testifying recommenders, who is unfairly neglected; and the party who testifiesto the damage of his discrimination-self-respect, and integrity!

LITERARY INTERCHANGE.

Ir would be a curious inquiry that, which would endeavour to ascertain the circumstances which obtain celebrity for a writer beyond the limits of his own country. Some of our greatest. English authors are perfectly unknown in Germany and France, and not a few of the noblest literary geniuses that France and Germany have produced have not yet reached England even by

name.

On the other hand, how many English scribblers whom the English themselves scarcely deign to read have a continental reputation! And how many French and German scribblers who are almost forgotten in their native land, have a popularity wider and far more fulminating than that which some of our best authors enjoy, or are ever likely to acquire. Fame is, of all human

caprices, the most capricious. Sometimes the eccentricity that condemns an author to obscurity and contempt in his own country, gives him glory somewhere else. Sometimes the breadth of heart and the catholicity of spirit, which make a writer a mystery to his nation, a mystery not to be revered but to be laughed at, make him a miracle to other nations, a miracle which they feel inclined to worship all the more enthusiastically from the very distance of the scene where it has appeared. It is strange also to see some worthy wight, who in his day was something more than a notoriety, but who for half-a-century has simply been known as one of the great unread, spoken of by foreign critics, as if he were as alive in the memory and the heart of Humanity, as Cervantes, or Ariosto, or Shakspeare. Thus, for instance, Villemain, an elegant and tasteful, often eloquent writer, though not remarkable for grasp or perspicacity as a thinker, and who, some fifteen or twenty years ago, was as celebrated as a lecturer on literature as Guizot on history, and Cousin on philosophy, devotes as much of serious attention and of conscientious analysis to Richardson the novelist as any English Review would think it proper to bestow on Walter Scott. Occasionally an author secures a European audience for the whole of his productions, however numerous, through having tickled their ear by some early production, trifling and tedious it may be in itself, but which flattered or echoed some temporary foible of the age. Would "Faust,” and "Wilhelm Meister be considered as such marvellous books, or would Goethe the Epicurean be viewed as so admirable a poet, so noble a man, if he had not when young arrested the notice of mankind by his sentimental "Werther?" Because one of Goethe's boyish works was preposterously overrated, it has been thought a duty as preposterously to overrate all the rest. Some of the best authors cannot be naturalised in foreign literatures. Barrow and Jeremy Taylor will always remain exclusively English. The former has a weight of thought, and an exhaustiveness which we look for in vain in any other preacher; but though often eloquent he has no artistic graces of style. His grand massiveness of solid sense unfits him for Germany, his want of rhetorical skill unfits him for France. Jeremy Taylor was not a remarkable thinker; neither can he properly be called an orator; he was a poet in prose, and perhaps as such, unsurpassed. Now poets prose are peculiarly English; other nations offer nothing precisely similar. The very circumstance, therefore, which renders the

name of Jeremy Taylor a hallowed name in England, prevents him from being naturalised in the literatures of other lands. Montaigne is altogether French; translate him into another language, you strip him of his quaint but picturesque and forcible style, and take from him half of his beauty and strength. There are authors who are very translateable, who are yet very inadaptable. Thus, though Montaigne was born fifty years after Rabelais, the style of Rabelais has much more flow and finish, is really a more modern style; yet the subjects which Rabelais chose, and their mode of treatment, render his works unsuitable for any atmosphere but France. In general it may be said, that the literary material that can most easily find its home everywhere, is French prose, chiefly by reason of the social universality of the French intellect, but also through the colloquial power of the French language, which makes it, from its friendly and familiar aspect, welcome, all the world over. Thus, Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth " is as much a household book in England as ever it has been in France. There are works which from their intense nationality cannot be relished in translation, though easily enough translated. The peculiarities belonging to the style of Junius can be rendered into another language without much loss of pungency, fervour, or energy. But Junius possesses scarcely any interest, except to those Englishmen who are familiar with tho history of England seventy or eighty years ago, not only in its greatest events, but in its minutest gossip and most trifling scandal. To any foreigner, therefore, except perhaps a ponderous gluttonous German mind aspiring to know all, both in the universe and out of it, Junius must be utterly without attraction. The "Provincial Letters of Pascal are nearly in the same predicament. What care the majority of English readers for the squabbles of Jesuits and Jansenists two hundred years ago? In the ecclesiastical history and in the national recollections of the French, however, those disputes have an indestructible vitality. The only persons in England to whom "The Provincial Letters" can have any charm, are ripe scholars, who would prefer reading them in the original. The productions of some authors have scarcely any other merit than that of style. All such it is folly to translate. La Fontaine had the genius, the rare genius for a poet, of being archly and aboundingly natural. His style is perfect; but his productions have no merit beyond the style. Hence he is the most tedious or the most pleasing of writers, according to the subject that chance