Regent was fain to exclaim, "Gently, gently, Monsieur l'Abbé! you are disguising me too much!" MASTER.-Being our own master, means that we are at liberty to be the slave of our own follies, caprices, and passions. Generally speaking, a man cannot have a worse or more tyrannical master than himself. As our habits and luxuries domineer over us, the moment we are in a situation to indulge them, few people are in reality so dependent as the independent. Poverty and subjection debar us from many vices by the impossibility of giving way to them: when we are rich and free from the domination of others, we are corrupted and oppressed by ourselves. There was some philosophy, therefore, in the hen-pecked husband, who being asked why he had placed himself so completely under the government of his wife, answered, "To avoid the worse slavery of being under my own." MEDICAL-PRACTICE.-Guessing at Nature's intentions and wishes, and then endeavouring to substitute man's. MELANCHOLY-Ingratitude to Heaven. O impious ingrates! cast your eyes A Maker of unbounded love ; If in the treasures scattered wide, Nor judge that mortals best fulfil A bountiful Creator's will, When, with a cheerful gratitude, They taste the pleasures He has strew'd, The love of man, the sacred page, When, by such evidence assailed, Your God and all His works have failed! As a good antidote to gloomy anticipations, we should all of us do well to recollect the saying of Sir Thomas More,— "If evils come not-then our fears are vain, MEMORY.-Rochefoucauld says, "Every one complains of his memory, no one of his judgment." And why? Because we consider the former as depending upon nature; and the latter upon ourselves. Alleged want of memory is a most convenient refuge for our self-love, since we can always throw it as a cloak over our ignorance. It is astonishing how much people are in the habit of forgetting what they never knew. "Strange," says the same writer, " that we can always remember the smallest thing that has happened to ourselves, and yet not recollect how often we have repeated it to the same person." It is a benevolent provision of nature, that in old age the memory enjoys a second spring-a second childhood, and that while we forget all passing occurrences, many of which are but painful concomitants of old age, we have a vivid and delightful recollection of all the pleasures of youth. Many a greybeard, who seems to be lost in vacancy, as he sits silently twidling his thumbs, is in fact chewing the mental cud of past happiness, and enjoying a tranquil gratification, which youngsters might well envy. Who can Objects become shadowy to the bodily eye, as they are more remote, but to the mental eye of age, the most distant are the most distinct. A man of eighty may forget that he was seventy, but he never forgets that he was once a boy. doubt the immortality of the soul, when we see that the mind can thus pass out of bodily decrepitude into a state of rejuveniscence? for this process amounts to a Palingenesia—a partial new birth out of a partial decease, preparatory to a total resurrection out of total dissolution. MINDS.-Large ones, like pictures, are seen best at a distance. Their beauties are thus enhanced, and their blemishes concealed,-a process which is reversed by a close inspection. This is the reason, to say nothing of envious motives, why we generally undervalue our contemporaries, and overrate the ancients. MIRROR.-John Taylor relates in his Records, that having restored sight to a boy who had been born blind, the lad was perpetually amusing himself with a hand-glass, calling his own reflection his little man, and enquiring why he could make it do everything that he did, except shut its eyes. A French lover, making a present of a mirror to his mistress, sent with it a poetical quatrain, which may be thus paraphrased: "This mirror my object of love will unfold, Whensoe'er your regard it allures : Oh! would, when I'm gazing, that I might behold On its surface the object of yours!" But the following old epigram, on the same subject, is in a much finer strain: "When I revolve this evanescent state, How fleeting is its form, how short its date; My being and my stay dependant still, I ask myself, as I my image view, Which is the real shadow of the two." MISADVENTURE-As well as Mischance and Misfortune, are all the daughters of Misconduct, and sometimes the mothers of Goodluck, Prosperity, and Advancement. To be thrown upon one's own re sources, is to be cast into the very lap of Fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development, and display an energy, of which they were previously unsusceptible. Our minds are like certain drugs and perfumes, which must be crushed before they evince their vigour, and put forth their virtues. Lundy Foot, the celebrated snuff manufacturer, originally kept a small tobacconist's shop at Limerick. One night, his house, which was uninsured, was burnt to the ground. As he contemplated the smoking ruins on the following morning, in a state bordering on despair, some of the poor neighbours, groping among the embers for what they could find, stumbled upon several canisters of unconsumed, but half-baked snuff, which they tried, and found it so grateful to their noses, that they loaded their waistcoat pockets with the spoil. Lundy Foot, roused from his stupor, at length imitated their example, and took a pinch of his own property, when he was instantly struck by the superior pungency and flavour it had acquired from the great heat to which it had been exposed. Treasuring up this valuable hint, he took another house in a place called Black Yard, and preparing a large oven for the purpose, set diligently about the manufacture of that high-dried commodity, which soon became widely-known as Black Yard snuff; a term subsequently corrupted into the more familiar word-Blackguard. Lundy Foot, making his customers pay literally through the nose, raised |