political, fiscal, and commercial, which would have completely crushed a less active and enterprising nation. When, therefore, they are desired to reverence the mis-governed and the unreformed institutions, to which alone they are told to consider themselves indebted for all the advantages they enjoy, one cannot help recalling the non sequitur of the Carmelite Friar, who instanced as a striking proof of the superintendance and goodness of Providence, that it almost invariably made a river run completely through the middle of every large city. Somewhat akin to this instance of naïveté was the reply of the Birmingham boy, who being asked whether some shillings, which he tendered at a shop, were good, answered with great simplicity, "Ay, that they be, for I seed father make 'em all this morning."

NOVELTY-What we recover from oblivion. We can fish little out of the river Lethe that has not first been thrown into it. The world of discovery goes round without advancing, like a squirrel in its cage, and the revolution of one century differs but little from that of its predecessor. New performers mount the stage, but the pieces and its accompaniments remain pretty much the same. Trumpets and taxes are the characteristics of the present æra. No security without immense standing armies, no

It is a

armies without pay, no pay without taxes. grievance which we cannot avoid, and of which, therefore, it were as well to say nothing; but if Tacitus is not silent on the subject, who can be? Neque quies gentium," says that historian, “sine armis, neque arma sine stipendiis, neque stipendia sine tributis haberi queunt."

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In the two extremes of life we have the most acute sense of novelty. To the boy all is new: to the old man, when this world no longer offers variety or change, is presented the most stimulating of all novelties—the contemplation of a new existence.

Shakspeare" exhausted worlds, and then imagined new;" but this is a privilege conceded to none but the chosen sons of genius. Common writers can only become original, when they have exhausted nature, by becoming unnatural. Like a mountebank at a fair, they surprise our attention by their extravagance, but they cannot keep it. We shrug our shoulders, and forget them. Many are the writers, nevertheless, who prefer a momentary fool's cap to a distant laurel.

NOVEMBER-The period at which most Englishmen take leave of the sun for nine months, and not a few of them for ever. A demure Scottish lady having been introduced to the Persian ambassador when in London, exclaimed with an incredulous air,

"Is it possible that ye are such idolators in Persia as to worship the sun?" "Yes, madam," was the reply," and so you would in England, if you ever saw him."

OATH-Legal. Making the awful and infinite Deity a party to all the trivial and vulgar impertinences of human life: an act of profanation equally required from a churchwarden and an archbishop, from a petty constable and the chief justice of England. "Let the law," says Paley, "continue its own functions, if they be thought requisite; but let it spare the solemnity of an oath, and, where it is necessary, from the want of something better to depend upon, to accept a man's word or own account, let it annex to prevarication penalties proportionable to the publie consequence of the offence."

Where they are made a test of religious belief, for the purpose of excluding any class of our fellow-subjects from their civil rights, oaths, being equally opposed to Christianity, policy, and justice, ought to be totally and finally abolished. He who first devised the oath of abjuration, profligately boasted that he had framed a test which should “damn one half of the nation, and starve the other;"-a vaunt well worth the consideration of those who have placed themselves within the first clause of his prophecy.

To the utterance of oaths, as execrations, a practice

equally hateful for its blasphemy and vulgarity, there seems to be little other inducement than its gratuitous sinfulness, since it communicates no pleasure, and removes no uneasiness, neither elevates the speaker, nor depresses the hearer. "Go," said Prince Henry, the son of James I., when one of his courtiers swore bitterly at being disappointed of a tennis match"Go! all the pleasures of earth are not worth a single oath."

OBEDIENCE-MILITARY- Must be implicit and unreasoning. "Sir," said the Duke of Wellington to an officer of engineers, who urged the impossibility of executing the directions he had received, "I did not ask your opinion, I gave you my orders, and I expect them to be obeyed." It might have been difficult, however, to yield a literal obedience to the adjutant of a volunteer corps, who, being doubtful whether he had distributed muskets to all the men, cried out—“ All you that are without arms will please to hold up your hands.”

ODOURS-Bad-the silent voice of nature, made audible by the nose. The worst may, in some degree, be sweetened to our sense, by a recollection of the important part they perform in the economy of the world. Those emitted by dead animals, attract birds and beasts of prey from an almost incredible distance,

who not only soon remove the nuisance, but convert it into new life, beauty, and enjoyment. Should no such resource be at hand, as is often the case in inhabited countries, the pernicious effluvia disengaged from these decaying substances, occasion them to be quickly buried in the ground, where their organised forms are resolved into chemical constituents, and they are fitted to become the food of vegetables. The noxious gas is converted into the aroma of the flower, and that which threatened to poison the air, affords nourishment and delight to man and beast. Animals are thus converted into plants, and plants again become animals ;-change of form and not extinctionor, rather, destruction for the sake of reproduction, being the system of nature. Pulverized human bones are now largely imported into England for manure, and the corn thus raised will again be eventually reconverted into human bones.

OLD AGE-need not necessarily be felt in the mind, as in the body; time's current may wear wrinkles in the face that shall not reach the heart: there is no inevitable decrepitude or senility of the spirit, when its tegument feels the touches of decay. We sometimes talk of men falling into their second childhood, when we should rather say that they have never emerged from their first, but have always been in an intellectual nonage. Vigorous minds very