axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

5 Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound.

When a young female wears a flat 20 Hope.' circular side-curl, gummed on each temple, when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers, and when she says 'Yes?' with the note of interrogation, you are generally 25 safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the 'feller' was you saw her with.

'What were you whispering?' said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, 30 as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

'I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.'

mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of long boots with tassels.

5

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished with claw-foot chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is com

Family portraits. The member of the 10 plete. Council, by Smibert. The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his commercial transac- 15 tions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honorable, etc., etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand 20 old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., I. A superb full-blown, mediæval gentleman, with a fiery dash of 25 Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of 30 his bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants. 2. 35 Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of Empire; bust à la Josephine; wisps of curls, like celerytips, at sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for 40 the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the gallery.

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,- family names; — you will find them at the head of their 45 respective classes in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents' condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and Hic liber est meus on the title- so page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos.

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, that have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear professor over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.

-I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they have n't. Perhaps you would like 55 to hear my

I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one 15 that was talking good things,- good enough to print? Why,' said he, you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.' The

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take,- 20 talker took him to the window and asked
When city fathers eat to live,

Save when they fast for conscience' sake,

When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail

That holds the iron on the hoof,

When in the usual place for rips

him to look out and tell him what he saw. 'Nothing but a very dusty street,' he said, and a man driving a sprinklingmachine through it.'

25 'Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?

Our gloves are stitched with special care, 30
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,-

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,

And claret-bottles harbor not

'Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us; the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the 35 image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay.

Such dimples as would hold your fist, Spoken language is so plastic,-you can

pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modeling. Out of it comes the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it;

but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is

and I promised them to read others occa- 50 within reach, and you have time enough,

sionally, if they had a mind to hear them.
Of course they would not expect it every
morning. Neither must the reader sup-
pose that all these things I have reported
were said at any one breakfast-time. I 55
have not taken the trouble to date them,
as Raspail, père, used to date every proof
he sent to the printer; but they were

you can't help hitting it.'

The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, Fust-rate.'- I acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. Fust-rate,' prime,'' a prime article,' ' a superior piece of goods, a handsome garment,' 'a gent

in a flowered vest,'- all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social status, if it is not already: 'That tells the whole story.' It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which wellmeaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it don't; simply because that' does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.

furnishing the food they required to work upon. If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. 5 The bird in sable plumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away to once more, never losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots, and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully 15 working from one end of his straight line to the other.

-It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much 20 study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this. Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology every year, and this, twenty, 25 thirty, fifty years together. They read a great many religious books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived, there- 30 fore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for want of religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might become actually better educated in theology than any one of them. We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity, than have received degrees at any of the universities.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little frisette' shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief, and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have been very virulent about what I said. So I went to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people's minds were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching; a very little of late years. Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it was 40 not so very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a rule I have long followed, to tell my worst faults to my minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]

35

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously 45 about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of times. I have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively, as electricians would say, in developing strong mental 50 currents. I am ashamed to think with what accompaniments and variations and fioriture I have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker,- not willingly, for my habit is reverential, but 55 as a necessary result of a slight continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both in action without

-I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,- two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.) — I continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. It

5

is in the nature of things that I should
consider these relatively excellent lines
or passages as absolutely good. So much
must be pardoned to humanity. Now I
never wrote a 'good' line in my life, but
the moment after it was written it seemed
a hundred years old. Very commonly I
had a sudden conviction that I had seen
it somewhere. Possibly I may have some-
times unconsciously stolen it, but I do
not remember that I ever once detected
any historical truth in these sudden con-
victions of the antiquity of my new
thought or phrase. I have learned ut-
terly to distrust them, and never allow 15
them to bully me out of a thought or line.

barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow; a slungshot could not have brought her down better. God forgive me!

After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained balancing tea-spoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads reached 10 the wall, where they left gratuitous advertisements of various popular cosmetics.]

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our conscious- 20 ness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of musical words has 25 had a long and still period to form in. Here is one theory.

When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of trial, he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for it. He has committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to the State Prison. The traditions, prescriptions, limitations, privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax; - a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts. It is this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in 30 our memories is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their 'apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for in- 35 that a great silent-moving misery puts a

stance, is as old as the trilobites an hour
after it has happened. It stains back-
ward through all the leaves we have
turned over in the book of life, before its
blot of tears or of blood is dry on the 40
page we are turning. For this we seem
to have lived; it was foreshadowed in
dreams that we leaped out of in the cold
sweat of terror; in the dissolving views'
of dark day-visions; all omens pointed 45
to it; all paths led to it. After the
tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep
that follows such an event, it comes upon
us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a
few moments it is old again,-old as 50
eternity.

[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at me, as I noticed, 55 with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken

new stamp on us in an hour or a moment, as sharp an impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow that has studied your case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you with his implements of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man were to be burned in any of our cities to-morrow for heresy, there would be found a master of ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and the best way of arranging the whole matter.