they bear the stamp of authority, and pass from hand to hand with scarcely a question raised as to their genuineness or their value. They are reverently received into ordinary parlance as the condensed wisdom of ages, and the verdicts of hoary-headed experiences; and, when once received, they govern with an authority like that of Holy Writ. Who has not heard, and perhaps been misled by the oft-repeated proverb, Feed a cold and starve a fever, interpreted to mean that fevers and colds are to receive opposite modes of treatment-“ stuffing" and "starving." Whereas its author, who endeavored to crowd words of wisdom into too narrow a space, no doubt knew and supposed that everybody else would know that a cold is only a fever under a disguised form, and, therefore, as in the proverb Marry in haste and repent at leisure, he intended to be understood as saying, "If you feed a cold you will have a fever to starve." The teaching implied in the old-time adage, The idle man's brain is the devil's workshop, and also in the phrase so common in criminal indictments, at the instigation of the devil, is calculated perhaps to exert a salutary influence, for, if there be a principle of evil, we may reasonably expect him to make use of just such opportunities for his chosen work. But, whatsoever may be one's faith on this subject, it may be no less salutary to keep in mind the fact, and it may at the same time help to relieve a much-slandered individual in accounting for the machinations of that workshop, that it is questionable whether we need inquire for any worse or busier instigator to evil than the workman's own heart; for there is another old, old adage which says, No man can find a worse friend than the one he brings with him from home. Charity begins at home. This is a capital and truthful saying if properly emphasized. Like every other virtue, it begins-in fact, it must begin-its genuine work as near as possible to the centre of one's being, and radiate thence, like the concentric waves of water and of light, so far as the laws of surrounding Nature will permit. If there be no vital pulse in the centre, there can be none in the extremities. Even patriotism is revealed in its last analysis to be only a noble self-love which first permeates the home, and then expands so as to embrace the country; and philanthropy is only an extension of the same generous feeling to the limits of the race. But for the same reason that a 80 - called patriotism and philanthropy, which would refuse to go beyond the limits of home, must become an intensified selfishness, so with a so-called charity. The proverb, to be used aright, must be emphazised on the second word. Charity covers a multitude of sins.-Could the several authors of this charming proverb arise from the dead and learn the interpretation which has been given it, their holy horror would probably express itself in a dramatic scene worth witnessing. Solomon, never probably a man of high spirituality, notwithstanding his world-famed wisdom (that is, his common-sense), began its history by writing, in Proverbs x. 12: "Hatred stirreth up strifes; but love covereth all sins." been condemned by high ethical authority, and is rapidly passing out of use, because it seems to base honesty on policy, instead of regarding it as morally obligatory, and thus lowering the standard of public morals. The proverb at the head of this paragraph has also been condemned, and is also passing out of use, because its tendency has been to lower the standard of popular education. There can be no question but that those peo The Septuagint translators gave a free and ness. The poet knowledge have also excelled in power; but any educator of youth who should act upon the principle that education consists in cramming the mind with knowledge will have perpetrated as great an error as would a body of civil-engineers who should saturate the atmosphere with vapor from boiling caldrons because it is known that steam is a motor. The truth is, that steam and knowledge are powers (or rather means of powers) only when properly used. Many a man who has been noted as a walking encyclopædia has been equally noted for inability to put his knowlThe tongue is an unruly member, untamed edge to account, because the practical part and untamable.· Few proverbs of caustic of his education had been neglected. It is character are more universally attested than the right use of knowledge-and rather the this, and, strange to say, attested most read-right use than the knowledge itself—which is ily by those who are most obnoxious to its entitled to the name of power. indictments. No doubt this is the effect, in Cowper seems to have had an indirect vision some cases, of ingenuous self-reproach; in of this truth when he wrote: others, probably, it is the effort to devise an excuse for language that is otherwise inexcusable. Viewed as a piece of animal mechanism, the tongue is marked with wonderful flexibility and adaptedness to vocal purposes. As to its training, it is of all the members of the human body, not excepting either hand or eye, the most perfectly ruled. In producing those articulate sounds by which thought is conveyed, and those modulations of voice which express the tone and spirit of that thought, it perfectly obeys every monition of the will. The tongue is, in fact, an excellent member-the best, perhaps, in this body-if only the heart be so. It is an unruly member" only by being too faithful a servant of the power that wields it. The world owes me a living.—By whom is this claim put in? If by one who has long and unselfishly labored for the good of the world at large, to the neglect of private interests, as did the apostles of our Lord, and as has done many a John Howard and Florence Nightingale since their day, and even an occasional Socrates among the heathen, the claim will be good, morally, if not legally. But such are the last persons whom we expect to urge it. They usually prefer to go on silently in their work of noble disinterestedness, and to say-if they say any thing"The Lord will provide." A claim of incomparably more manliness and truth was once expressed by a horribly maimed soldier, who said with bright and hopeful air: "I know that the world has some useful place for me to fill, and work for me to do; my business is to hunt it up." Knowledge is power. This proverb is in two respects like Franklin's Honesty is the best policy-first, in probably being sound by original intention, and secondly in probably being the parent of more evil than good. Franklin's, after the reign of a century, has "Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, "Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of decency is want of sense.” If there be any misapplication predicable of these words it is rather in the reason given by the author than in the use made by those who quote them. In any case the last line is true; but in offenses against society no excuse on behalf of the offender is regarded as more available than to say that he knew no better. Even the apostle Paul affirmed, in a certain sense, its validity when, in speaking of his blasphemy against Christ, and his persecution of the Church before he became a believer, he said, "But I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief." The plea, however, to be urged by permission of the offender requires such a degree of humility, or rather of self-abnegation, as to be seldom heard; for, as another old proverb says, Most people would rather be ac counted knaves than fools. Possibly Mr. Pope had this fact in mind when penning these lines; but, if he had, he would have been nearer the truth, and not a whit the less biting, if he had said substantially, in his smooth verse: "Immodest words admit but one defense, That want of decency is want of sense; and perhaps this is what he intended. What everybody says must be true.—There are certain deep and resistless intuitions possessing the universal mind-such as belief in the existence of a God and in the immortality of the soul—which might be safely received as true, even if they had no other support than their evident adaptedness to the necessities of our being, and the fact that they impress all unbiased minds alike, thus beautifully illustrating the sententious old maxim of the Romans, Vox populi vox Dei. These intuitions are always strongly marked with the peculiarity that, although they may not need the support of argument, they are not opposed to reason. There are cases, however, in which the vox populi has been in direct opposition to the vox Dei, as afterward revealed by reason, though none of these cases are of a moral nature, nor is their accompanying perception worthy the name of intuition. A few generations back, under the guidance of another old proverb that Seeing is believing, "everybody said" that the world was flat, and that it was a sort of immovable centre around which daily revolved the sun, moon, and stars. But when this "voice of the people" came to be tested by facts, which reason proclaimed to be utterances of God in Nature, it was found to be utterly false, being an illusion of the senses; the earth is not flat, nor do any of the heavenly bodies daily rotate around it. Then, again, that mysterious and all-prevailing authority known as "everybody" is proved in many cases to be a mere myth, being composed oftentimes of one's own party in politics or clique in society, while their maxims are contradicted by people of other parties and of other cliques. There is one form, however and perhaps but one-iu which reverence for a universal verdict is usually liable to be cherished to an injurious extent. It is when that verdict comes in the shape of a time-honored but unsound proverb, or in the false interpretation of a sound one. The popular sentiment toward all such proverbs is well expressed in the stanza of an old English poet: "The people's voice the voice of God we call ; And what are proverbs but the people's voice, Coined first and current made by public choice? Then sure they must have weight and force withal." At the risk of disturbing the shades of the poets by irreverent criticism, we must notice another saying from the land of song, being nothing less than Dr. Young's celebrat ed line "All men think all men mortal but themselves." These words embody a noble as well as a reprehensible truth-not always appreciated, however, by those who quote, and not even acknowledged by the learned author from whose pen they flowed. He intended them as a biting sarcasm on the folly of procrasti nation, especially in the matter of religion; and he seems not to have been able to discern any thing but insanity in the slowness of mankind to realize the truth of their own mortality. Now, whenever this slowness is The following lines will suffice to show the animus of the passage, though better shown by quoting more largely : Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool, And scarce in human wisdom to do more. All promise is poor, dilatory man. At thirty man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Resolves-and reresolves; then dies the same. the result of an unwillingness to entertain an unwelcome truth, we must admit that it is in the highest degree chargeable with folly. But we may question whether it is always, or even usually, the offspring of a parent so unworthy, and whether, on the contrary, it may not be one of those deep and resistless intuitions of the universal mind, having in this fact the proof that it is the outspeaking voice of God himself. That the human body is mortal no one can doubt; it is obvious to every sense, and attested by every law of Nature. If man has an immortal part, it must be a something which is invisible, intangible, beyond the reach of sense and of material laws. Now, it is an important fact, as significant us it is singular, that the conception we form of other people and the conception we form of ourselves are from totally different standpoints. When the name of another is mentioned there instantly rises before the mind of the listener an image of that person's bodily presence. When our own names are mentioned there arises no bodily image (we do not thus symbolize ourselves; indeed, we cannot, for the man who "beholdeth his natural face in a glass, goeth his way and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was "). The mention of our own names is instantly associated with certain consciousnesses of thought and feeling, which constitute our mental picture of self, and by which we distinguish that self from all other beings. In other words, the idea we naturally form of others is bodily; the idea we form of ourselves is spiritual. When, therefore, the mortality of another is alluded to, our conception of it is easy, because we have only to imagine the living body of that other pale, cold, and stiff in death. But when our own mortality is the subject of thought, we cannot without special effort realize it, because these consciousnesses by which self identifies self cannot be conceived of as pale, cold, stiff, or, in fact, other than living and active. If, therefore, the soul of man be immortal, this natural tendency of men to "think all men mortal but themselves" is not in all cases the insane habit which Dr. Young seems to have supposed, but, on the contrary, may be a noble instinct, revealing to us, as by a voice from heaven, the momentous truth that we are immortal! EDITOR'S TABLE. THE Yet the ideal hotel is He who aspires to keep great in detail. In one a HE average American tourist is good-bumored and easily contented. It is rarely that he grumbles, even under injury. And he is prone to lively gratitude when, in the course of his travels, he is made here and there thoroughly comfortable. It is quite needless to point out how dependent he is upon the well-keeping of hotels. We do not design to become cynically bitter upon the American landlord, much less to compare him unfavorably with his foreign confrère. In very many respects the average first-class American hotel is quite superior to the average first-class European hotel. Its rooms are larger; its linen is cleaner and drier; its service is more assiduous, and on the whole less mercenary; its food more various and quite as good; and its method of charging more satisfactory. rarely to be found. such a one must be or two little, or seemingly little, things very beneficent improvement might be made in most of our hostelries, large and small, with little expense, and no very harrowing amount of care. The average traveler, for instance, might be conciliated, in the matter of food, by a few simple and wholesome reforms. We would commend to enterprising "mine hosts" everywhere rather more attention to the arts of making good bread, distilling good coffee, and the cooking of plain steaks and chops. A traveler, even if he be stopping at a hotel-palace in New York, Saratoga, or Newport, will generally find the fancy, fixed-up, Frenchified dishes, which take up so much space on the bewildering bill of fare, pall upon his taste ere many trials; and will fall back upon the plain and substantial food to which he is accustomed at home. If he finds the coffee, the bread, the beef, and the mutton, as good as they are upon his own table, he is usually thankful and content. An hotel that is famous for its good bread has a far better lease of prosperity than one that is famous for its good fricandeaus, vols au vent, or new-fangled entrées. Yet it is exceptional when the traveler hits upon really good bread and good coffee. The average bread and coffee, even at firstclass hotels at summer resorts, are just sufferable, and that is all. Better bread and coffee will be found in nine out of ten of the private houses of a respectable New York street. Yet it would seem to be an easy matter for a landlord, who must be supposed to have abundant means with which to secure the best bread and coffee making talent, to provide his guests with that for which they would, as a rule, far more heartily thank him than for the more ostentatious dishes which his head-cook tasks an inventive brain to produce. Few can enjoy a breakfast, however sumptuous, without good coffee; or a dinner, with however many courses à la Paris, without good bread; and amendment in these respects seems so feasible, that we hope the hostly mind will some time be inspired by it. which suggested the main plan of the Grandmiliation; and hence if the law in the inflic THE commotion excited in England in consequence of the sentence of Colonel Baker is very great. Society seems to be diWhile upon the subject of American ho- vided upon the question-one faction bittertels, we may as well quote some rather sur- ly denouncing the sentence of the court as prising information about them which the unjustly lenient, the other defending it as London Daily Telegraph has been giving to fully as severe as the offense and the circumits readers. The ignorance of this paper stances pertaining to it warranted. The subabout every thing American is inveterate,ject is one that has brought out no little disand must, we should think, sooner or later become notorious. We can hardly look to a journal to enlighten Englishmen about this country which gravely asserts Brooklyn and Staten Island to be a civic part of the city of New York. Its description of our hotelsystem is quite as wide of the truth. The London reader is told that it is the custom "to drive the guests, at the sound of a gong, at certain times of the day, and at no others, into a common dining-hall, and there allow them to browse at will in a wilderness of second-rate cookery." There is just enough truth in this statement to encourage the false inference that Englishmen will make from it, that the meals in our hotels are confined within arbitrary and narrow periods-the fact being, that a range of two or three hours is given for each meal. If we mistake not, the guests of English hotels are much more restricted; at most of them it is only at a certain precise hour that one can get a dinner with a hot cut off the joint." Then, as to service, the Telegraph seems to regard the system of feeing waiters, and chambermaids, and porters, and boot-blacks, which prevails in England, preferable to our fashion of paying for service in the lump hotel-charge. Our hotels discourage the giving of fees to waiters, the result being that a visitor is mainly compelled, except at meal-times, to wait upon himself." We venture to assert that in our well-conducted hotels guests are waited upon quite as assiduously as at the best London houses. We supposed, moreover, that the feeing of waiters was generally regarded in England as an evil and nuisance which it was well to get rid of. Certainly the Telegraph, when it has not happened to want to turn a contrast unfavorable to America, has spoken regretfully of the universal bribery of English waiters, and the pecuniary competition of guests to secure special attention. That American hotels are not such places of cheerless vastness, elaborate discomfort, frantic food-bolting, and curiously-devised methods of inconveniencing the guests, as the Telegraph would have its readers believe, is evident from the wide-spread imitation of them in Europe. It was the American hotel cussion on the whole question of the penal tion of its penalties makes no distinctions, it simply succeeds in making practically tremendous differences. If it be a fundamental maxim that all men should suffer alike for similar offenses, then, in order that they may suffer alike the penalty should be adjusted to the character, rank, and conditions pertaining to the persons under judgment. An inflexible law is sure to be an unjust law. A law incompetent to recognize the difference between a woman reared tenderly, amid ease and luxury, and a fierce termagant of the gutter, or insensible to the difference between a man of breeding and life-long repute and one hardened to every form of degradation, such a law is actually very unjust, however much it may carry upon the surface a seeming equity. How far it may be prac ticable to act upon these differences of character and condition, it is not easy to say. In many kinds of offenses it is certain that it cannot be done; but, as the law always falls even at its best with peculiar harshness upon that better class who are not habitual criminals, who have under some mad temptation sacrificed every thing that had made life dear, there need be no fear that these unfortunates will not experience the bitter consequences of their misdoing to the full. A VERY intelligent correspondent of a Western paper has been dilating upon the evidences which he found, on a recent visit to England, of the power, glory, and great future, of our mother-land. Among other subjects, he examined that of the English land-tenure. Going thither with the strongest prejudices against that system, which "puts great estates in the hands of a few persons, and divorces the many from any interest in the soil except as tenants and hirelings," he seems to have made some discoveries which modified his opinion. The chief was, that farming in England has come to be not only an industry but a trade. Companies and firms have been organized, with the object of leasing large tracts of land, and of cultivating it to the best advantage by the aid of the latest appliances and of generous outlays for wages and improvement. As far as it goes, the result of this system is to convert the peasant into an artisan, and, if be so chooses, also into a stockholder. No one can deny that this is a great advance upou the old customs of English landlordism; nor is it surprising that these agricultural companies, when in full operation, get eight or nine per cent. profit, where the landed proprietors have long been, and are to this day, content with two or three. But the correspondent of whom we speak greatly exag gerates the extent and influence of agricultural companies. After all, there is but a で very small portion of the arable land of England which can be so leased; prejudice and jealousy on the part of most landed proprietors will not permit a wide range of such operations. The writer proceeds to argue that the commercial system is far better than it would be to divide up all the land in England equally among heads of families; and 80 it is. But in the first place, as we have said, that system can go but little way; and, in the second, it is certainly possible to find some reforms and ameliorations in the arbitrary land-tenure short of adopting the communistic programme of an equal division of property. The great difficulty is, that English land is not permitted to circulate freely, as a marketable commodity. Put English land upon the same basis as American land, and we should hear no more, probably, of two peers owning half a county, and the Duke of Sutherland riding by rail from dawn to dusk over his own domain. The richest would always have the most land; but it would pass gradually from the hands of the patricians who are content with an income of three per cent. from the cultivated farms, and who keep large spaces for parks and preserves which yield them no income at all, into the hands of enterprising capitalists who would force the farms into their highest production, and turn the parks and preserves into flowing fields of wheat and rye. To abolish the old prescriptive laws of primogeniture and entail would be a long step toward that free trade in land which is the best possible remedy for existing evils. | signed for; and he will discover that pedes trians have no rights which those in possession of the highways are in any way bound to respect. He must make détours around loading and unloading trucks; he must pick his way amid labyrinths of boxes; he must dodge beneath drooping awnings and pendent fabrics; he must circumnavigate show - cases and samples of merchandise; he must perform his task with the intense consciousness that the highways are in no wise designed for him or his class. He will be perplexed a little, no doubt, at the universal acceptance of this fact. If he has been abroad, he will recollect cities where the highways are wholly withdrawn from the uses to which they are given up here, the rights of the trav eler therein having the first and the supreme consideration, and he will greatly wonder how it is that in those countries so different an idea of the purposes of a highway should! prevail from that which obtains in ours. IN the JOURNAL of September 4th the author of an article entitled "High-Flying and its Dangers" erroneously put to death the distinguished aeronaut, Professor Wise. We are half inclined to thank our contributor for his mistake, inasmuch as it has been the means of eliciting the subjoined pleasant note from the still living and very bopeful professor : "PHILADELPHIA, September 4, 1875. "To the Editor of Appletons' Journal. "DEAR SIR: In the present number of your JOURNAL you say I'died peacefully in my bed.' In saying that, you committed a moral homicide. I am not dead nor sleeping, but full of life and vigor, working and living in the hope of being enabled to prove to the world that a system of aerial drifting with the balloon, via Gulf Stream air - current, from New York to England, is a feasible thing. Indeed, it is merely a matter of endurance to float. That part of the necessity is no longer problematical. We can use copper balloons. One of two hundred feet diameter, made of copper sheeting, weighing one pound per square foot, will have a net lifting power of sixty-eight tons when filled with hydrogen gas. ONE of our citizens, writing to an evening contemporary in regard to the obstructions in our streets, innocently asks what our highways are for. Inasmuch as the inquirer is well known as an old and intelligent citizen, it is much. to be wondered where his eyes have been all these years. What are our highways for? Why, they are for stabling unused vehicles, and for the storage of empty boxes and barrels; they are for the display of merchandise, and for the con"Now, as I hope to live long enough yet venience of sidewalk venders; they are for to demonstrate this theory in an humble way, telegraph-poles, awning-posts, and shutteryou will be generous enough to resuscitate boxes; they are for garbage and ash recepta- me, pat me on the back, and say encouragingcles; they are for protruding signs, flauntingly, Go on and try.' As another inducement to you to keep me alive a little while longer, allow me to tell you that I am diligently engaged in laying the foundation of a system of weather predictions by which we shall be enabled to prophesy the weather a year in advance. We have cycles of weather, as we have cycles of eclipses. Our planet is subject to vicissitudes of perturbations and pressures from the other planets by conjunctions, oppositions, quadratures, and by the interference of comets, acting upon the elastic shell of our earth, its atmosphere producing climatic phenomena that fail to be explained by mere terrestrial differentiations. banners, and dilapidated awnings; they are for circular-distributors and placard promenaders; they are for fruit and candy stands; they are for target-excursions and military funerals; they are for everybody who has a patent nuisance or an ingenious inconvenience specially designed to intrude upon the rights of other people. It is easy enough to see, for one who goes about and keeps his eyes open, what the streets are for; but in ɔbtaining this knowledge, he is occupying the "All these considerations toward the evostreets in the way they are evidently not de-lution and progress of science call upon you to take me out of the death-bed and to put me fairly on my feet again, as I have before me this minute a proposition to make a number of balloon-ascensions in the interest of sci ence. "Your JOURNAL claims to disseminate science, civilization, art, refinement, and literature, and it will but be promoting these ends by allowing me a lease yet a little while longer over and beyond the sixty-seven winters that have frosted my head, if not to fully establish the two systems above mentioned, to at least teach my grandson, John Wise the younger, how to take up the line of march in the science of meteorology, to prove that the balloon is made for nobler ends than acrobatic performances. To many good people the accusation that a novel is "sensational" is about the worst that can be brought against it; but, though our own taste for sensational novels is but feebly developed, long experience has convinced us that there is a species of story more preposterously unnatural than even the sensational, more "weak'nin' to the mind " than poor poetry, and more prejudicial to literary good morals than the familiar tales of bigamy, murder, and sudden death. Of such, Mrs. Newman's "Jean" (New York: Harper & Brothers) is a recent example. Mrs. Newman quite evidently congratulates herself on not being as other (naughty) novelists are, and on writing "pure, quiet, healthful" stories, which even Mr. Pecksniff might have read aloud in his family circle without bringing a blush to the maidenly cheek of his daughters; yet, after spending an hour or two in following Jean's adventures, we are prepared to accept Miss Braddon's most lurid story as plausible, probable, and life-like, in comparison. It is not merely that its plot is incoherent and absurd, that its coincidences are too numerous to mention, and that there is no logical antecedent for any thing that is said or done by any one of the names that do duty for persons in the story: Mrs. Newman absolutely insults her readers by the impudence of her demands upon their credulity. Either from poverty of invention or a superabundant faith in this credulity, she does not take the trouble to vary in the slightest degree the circumstances of her heroine's successive disappearances. Three times Jean runs away from as many different households, and each time it is against ber own inclinations and interest, and against the wishes of those she was most bound to consider, and brought about each time by a precisely identical misapprehension. The culmination of it all is, that threo different advertisements from the said three households appear simultaneously in the Times, each offering a reward for information that will lead to the discovery of Jean, she at the time lying sick of a fever brought on by the hardships to which she had thus unnecessarily exposed herself. A parallel performance is that of Maud (to whom is assigned the wicked business of the story), who inserts in the Times, first, a fictitious announcement of her own marriage with a certain Nugent Orme, and afterward a fictitious announcement of Jean's death. The first is intended for Jean alone, and, of course, she sees it at once, while no one of the dozen or more persons who could have exposed the falsehood happens upon it. The second announcement, on the other hand, is intended for these dozen or more people exclusively, and, of course, they see it immediately on its appearance; while Jean, and those of her friends who might have corrected it, conveniently overlook that special issue of the paper. The author's ingenuity, such as it is, is expended in getting Jean out of one set of difficulties immediately to plunge her into another, all of them being destitute of any conceivable reason except to give a cumulative impression of Jean's angelic loveliness of character. Spite of all, however, the numerous complexities are removed by the one solitary sensible act, which is credited to Jean during the entire course of the story: the wicked are punished, the virtuous rewarded, and the curtain descends to the familiar music of wedding-bells. It would be waste of time to analyze the several "characters," which are of a piece with the plot. Mrs. Newman evidently wished to create a heroine who should attract by contrast with the typical, worldly-wise young lady of ordinary fiction; and her recipe for making one is to endow the said heroine with every quality which the ordinary young lady has not, and to represent her as doing on any given occasion the exact opposite of what the ordinary young lady would do. Accordingly, Jean really loves her aunt and cousins, and actually believes them when they declare that they love her; when a certain lady, to whom she has just been introduced, politely expresses the wish to become better acquainted, she opens widely her dark, liquid eyes, looks wistfully into those of the other, and asks "Why?" when the young men pay her compliments and make love to her, she utterly refuses to become self-conscious, and frankly pays them back in kind; when she goes to a ball, she exclaims aloud to her aunt, so that all the room can hear, "Isn't this splendid? did you ever see any thing so delightful?" and, when the young men crowded around for dances, "she delightfully gave them her tablets to fill up as they chose, and when they disagreed among themselves as to who was to have which, frankly informed Edward Lawrence, who appealed to her, that it did not matter in the least-it was all the same to her." Of course, such freshness and simplicity, after our surfeit of heroines who are acquainted with the ordinary convenances of society, are very charming, and it is not surprising that wherever she goes she wins the hearts of all except the wicked. But, in addition to all this, Jean is a genius," as distinguished from her accomplished cousin Maud, who only has "talent." The difference between genius and talent, as defined by Mrs. Newman, is that, while Maud could detect the slightest flaw in logic or reasoning from given premises, Jean, though weak in logic, had an intuitive perception of the weakness of the premises themselves. Indeed, Jean won Nugent Orme's love (which should have been given to Maud) | by revealing to him that after reading a certain philosophical pamphlet four times with the aid of the dictionary, and sitting up till twelve o'clock at night to do it, she had "hit the centre-point of the writer's fallacy, when Maud's quick intelligence had failed to find it." As to Nugent Orme, the hero of the story, who spends his income in social experiments for the benefit of the laborer-who has "every important question of the day—religious, political, and social-represented upon his library-table, with all the best opinions for and against it "-who discusses with his betrothed at balls the 66 new philosophies as they arise," and who is a "skeptic," but not an "infidel "he is as pretty a prig and as neat a specimen of the woman's ideal man as we have lately encountered. Most young ladies will be sure to follow Jean's example in falling in love with him; and we are compelled to confess that, in spite of all we have said, "Jean" is a story with which many readers will be greatly pleased. THE fifteenth volume of "Little Classics" (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.) is devoted to "Minor Poems," and contains one hundred and forty-two pieces. The selection is very good indeed, and, if the reader regrets the absence of some poetical favorites which he would fain believe are little classics, he will find himself compensated by others with which he was; perhaps, not so familiar. As we have already said, Mr. Johnson's collection of poetry cannot compare, as a whole, with Palgrave's, or Dana's, or Bryant's, or several others that might be named; but it is excellent as far as it goes, and the entire series, poetical as well as prose, is well worth shelf-room in every family library. REFERRING to the death of the late Bishop Thirlwall, the Saturday Review says: "The name of another great scholar has to be added, alongside of the names of Finlay and Willis, to the list of those whom death has taken from us within a year of which little more than half has as yet passed. It may be that a generation which has not yet learned to know the name of Finlay has already forgotten the name of Thirlwall. But those who know what writing history really is, and who know the powers which it calls for-those who hold that two good books on the same subject are better than one, and who do not think that the appearance of the second makes the former useless-they will feel that one of the few men at whose feet the learner might sit in the full trust that he would never be misled has passed away from among us. Of three great English historians of Greece, three men of whom any age and land might have been proud, all now have gone, and two have gone within a few months of each other. The two men who have, between them, told in our own tongue the tale of Greece, from her earliest to her latest days, were in life far apart from one another in their callings and in their places of abode. They were yet farther apart in the motives and circumstances which led them severally to undertake the task of which each of them so well discharged his own share. In the life of each there was a contemplative and a practical stage; but those stages came in reverse order in the lives of the two men. The writings of one deal wholly with a distant past; the writings of the other begin, indeed, from the distant past, but carry on the tale down to days in which the historian recorded events in which he had been an actor. The man who went out to fight for Greece lived on in the land which he had helped to free to be at once her historian and her censor. The other, a scholar from his cradle, finished his one great work early in life, and was then called away to practical life in a post as toilsome and difficult as any that could be found within the range of his calling. This marked contrast in the position of the two men leaves its impress on their writings. It is vain to argue which does his work the better of the two. Each does it as it was natural that he should do it in the position in which he found himself, and from the point of view in which he necessarily looked on his subject. It is enough to say that, between them, they have told the whole tale of Greece, and that each has told his part of it as it never was told before him." ONE Mr. George Vasey has published in London a somewhat extraordinary and, we should judge, very comical work, entitled "The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling,' which the Saturday Review notices as follows: "Mr. Vasey has devoted himself to the study of laughter with, as he says, 'all the seriousness and gravity becoming a scientific or philosophical inquiry,' but he has as yet only a rough outline of his views to offer. Mr. Vasey is of opinion that laughing has become a confirmed habit of the human race from the practice of tickling babies, and doubts whether children would ever begin to laugh if they were not stimulated or prompted, but let alone, and treated naturally and rationally.' He is very severe on parents and nurses for being so foolish as to imagine that the sounds proceeding from babies under such circumstances are manifestations of pleasure and delight. His own view is that they are 'nothing more nor less than spasmodic and involuntary contractions and dilatations of the pectoral muscles and the lungs, excited into action by absurd ticklings and stupid monkey tricks. . . . The conclusion is unavoidable, that the absurd habit of laughing,' which Mr. Vasey also thinks uncomfortable, 'is entirely occasioned by the unnatural and false associations which have been forced upon us in early life.' One of the chapters is devoted to 'the degrading and vicious consequences of the habit of laughing.' Sensible people, Mr. Vasey holds, rarely laugh, and fools who like laughing do a great deal of harm by encouraging folly in others in order to have something to laugh at. How much better, he thinks, it would be if people would be content with smiling, which does not twist the face into horrible grimaces; and he gives a number of illustrations to deter his fellow-creatures from making frights of themselves by laughing. On the other hand, there are pictures of the 'entreating smile,' the 'confiding smile,' the 'mother's sympathetic smile,' the infant's smile of delight,' the 'joyous smile of friendly recognition,' the supremely affectionate smile,' the 'pensive smile' (of a very idiotic character), and so on, which readers of the work can practise with the help of a mirror. We suspect Mr. Vasey will have some difficulty in putting dowu laughter, but it might perhaps be well if people were more reasonable in regard to what they laugh at." เ THE Paris correspondent of the London Academy, writing of Mérimée's "Lettres à une autre Inconnue," says: "This new Inconnus |