pretation of the words gentleman and gentlewoman: a designation at least for attributes not to be confounded with adherence to conventional forms, or mere refinement-much less with tameness or inanity.

THERE are numerous fragments of life which, so far as action or enjoyment is concerned, might be subtracted without injury. Yet these very seasons may afford peculiar advantages for the cultivation of patience, which is often more important than either action or enjoyment.

IF yo σeavтóv, taken home as a living precept, be a characteristic of wisdom, no wise man is proud; though many wise men are vain, and many also occasionally assume the appearance of pride, to escape the encroachments of petulance or affectation. Nearly allied to such a trait is the feeling which Swift attributed to himself,

That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride,—

a not unfrequent associate of distinguished mental power. Swift was about twenty-six when he drew this lineament of the future satirist. The fire of genius had probably been long smouldering in his breast, though it had not broken out into any decisive coruscations.

PERSONS Sometimes appear to have pride, but it is rather hypocrisy. In reality they are quite sensible of their own deficiencies; but wish to create the belief that themselves, at least, entertain a favourable opinion of their merits.

SOME natures are so humble and diffident as almost to adopt the representations of falsehood and calumny against themselves. It would seem also as if, under extraordinary circumstances or excitement, man was susceptible of the most unfavourable impressions respecting his own character, even as to points on which he is at other times persuaded of his general innocence. We have a memorable illustra

tion in the case of Warren Hastings, when impeached before the Lords; and who afterwards declared that while listening to the almost supernatural eloquence of Burke, he believed himself, during the space of half an hour, to be one of the most culpable beings on earth. Admitting that he had considerable reason for self-reproach, we can scarcely account for the production of so remarkable and vivid a sentiment, without making large allowance for what may be called instinctive sympathy with the orator's transport of passion, whose magnificent invectives appear to have subdued himself almost as much as his hearers. Strong emotion in others, especially when heightened by the colourings of rhetorical genius, has always some influence on our feelings, and for the moment perhaps on our judgments.

WE need only be brought into contact with men in cases where their duty, apart from the sway of interest or passion, is concerned, to be convinced of their immersion in secularity and sense. The exclamation of Persius, who so well reproved the selfishness and grovelling propensities of his countrymen, presents but too faithful a picture of the multitude in every age:

O curvæ in terras animæ, et cœlestium inanes!

It is no little praise of the Platonic system that it aimed at the subjugation of sordid material tendencies; and, endeavouring to raise minds from the dust, instructed them to regard as the sole true good, the intellectual and divine. But what a system imbued with so elevating a principle too seldom realised, that nobler philosophy to which it bears so many points of resemblance has more signally accomplished; yet chiefly in those rarer instances where its quintessential elements have served to neutralise the multiform errors and corruptions with which it has commonly been blended.

THE vices of men appear to be changed, rather than eradicated or essentially diminished, by the progress of

civilization and refinement. Perhaps among one portion of the race or another, there has been an advance in goodness as well as intelligence, from the first rude and unexpanded state of being to the present; but mankind, I fear, taken in the gross, are not much wiser or better or happier than they were four thousand years ago. Yet many an intervening epoch no doubt fancied itself on the verge of a species of millennium, that was to obliterate the ravages of evil, and usher in a paradisiacal order of things; as numbers in our own day, revelling in hope and imagination, if not in fact, will dream dreams. Perhaps, as Goethe once suggested, and as the ages required for the explosion of the most factitious beliefs might seem to indicate, the process of human developement is so slow that not merely thousands but millions of years may be necessary for its accomplishment. At present indeed, even in countries the most renowned for civilization, the advancement of the species, estimated not by material progress, or the multiplication of facilities for luxurious existence, but by exemption from debasing prejudices and ignoble aims, and by the worship of the pure and beautiful, may well be doubted: while our own country in particular, that some fondly think is to escape the law by which nations have hitherto had their period of culmination and decline, is not without those symptoms of disease at the core, which ever precede the fall of states and empires.

DEATH AND LIFE.

ERE it not for our familiarity with death, we should haply consider it one of the most unnatural events

in the universe, yet only in the sense in which every innovation on the customary order of things appears unnatural. For in truth it is no more wonderful to die than to live; to undergo the change called death, than the change effected at birth. Man exists before he is born, and unless some of his deepest instincts are fallacious as ever oracle of old, ceases not to be when he expires. Death is but a kind of second birth; the close of an embryo state of being, and the commencement of a new and more enlarged existence. It is the last of the physical changes incessantly taking place in our vital material frame, all of which are in the eye of philosophy alike mysterious and incomprehensible. In short, it is no more wondrous, and to a nature that can link the spiritual with the visible, need scarcely be more a subject of regret, that the body dies, than that a tree does; which, marked by the same process of waste and supply, exhibits a corresponding developement, maturity, and decay:-while fruitblossoms, perishing unreluctantly on the approach of the fruit, and flowers, that die each year without a sigh, speak touchingly of the waywardness of longing for mere length of life.

THE novelty of the present state is commonly dispelled, ere its lights and its shadows vanish in the grave. After

the first flush of youth is over, the flower begins to fade, the elixir is quaffed, and, apart from the higher aims of duty, or those transient visitations of thought or imagery that fall like sunshine on the heart, little remains but a repetition of things consecrated rather by usage or necessity than by pleasure. Both the honey and the gall of life, its best and its worst, are for the most part exhausted long before its termination. The monotony of such an existence might well be deemed an augury and foreshadowing of another, and sufficient to divest the act of transition of its terrors. Man is naturally an inquisitive being, and for the sake of new scenes and adventures will often brave the utmost difficulties and perils. Why then does he shrink from dissolution, the precursor of the greatest variety? or feel no attraction towards those surprising and magnificent spectacles which eternity may disclose? Much is no doubt attributable to the operation of instinctive attachment to life; but more, perhaps, to certain melancholy or undefinable apprehensions respecting futurity, with its myriad states of existence, corresponding to the myriad shades of character with which it is entered. It is less what persons enjoy in this world, than what they fear in the realms beyond, that arrays the parting hour in colours so sombre, filling the imagination with a strange and mystic awe, as of the next string of the raree-show.

The remedies applied to these flickering disquietudes are not seldom such as an expanded perception refuses to admit, or have no relation to the feeling, often most complex and subtle, that gave them birth. To reconcile the mind to the thoughts of dissolution, philosophy can tell us, that it will afford exemption from sickness and pain; extinguish envy; diminish or destroy hatred; and deliver from the vicissitudes and uncertainty attending our mortal condition :-but what can all this avail the cold clay, or the spirit once passed beyond the boundaries of sense? Something higher is demanded by the yearnings and mysterious instincts of the soul, when