4. Though in a bare and rugged way, JOSEPH ADDISON. DEFINITIONS.-2. Meads, meadows. 4. Dē'vi oùs, out of the right way. Be guile', to cause to pass without notice. 107.-QUACK-ADVERTISEMENTS. SIR RICHARD STEELE was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1671. After some years at the Charterhouse School, he entered Merton College, Oxford. He wrote many essays, besides a number of dramas, and some political and religious works. He was associated with Addison in the publication of The Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian. His writings display great power of invention and great insight into men's characters and motives; they are full of keen but gentle satire, and furnish instruction and amusement combined in a pleasing form. He died September 21, 1729. 1. THERE is hardly a man in the world, one would think, so ignorant as not to know that the ordinary quack-doctors who publish their abilities in little brown billets, distributed to all who pass by, are, to a man, impostors and murderers; yet such is the credulity of the vulgar and the impudence of these professors that the affair still goes on, and new promises of what was never done before are made every day. 2. What aggravates the jest is that even this promise has been made as long as the memory of man can trace it, and yet nothing performed, and yet still prevails. As I was passing along to-day, a paper given into my hand by a fellow tells us as follows: "In Russel Court, over against the Cannon Ball, at the Surgeon's Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon who has prac ticed surgery and physic, both by sea and land, these twenty-four years. He by the blessing cures the yellow jaundice, scurvy, dropsy, surfeits, long sea-voyages, campaigns, etc., as some people that has been lame these thirty years can testify; in short, he cureth all diseases incident to men, women, or children." 3. The art of managing mankind is only to make them stare a little to keep up their astonishment,—to let nothing be familiar to them, but ever to have something in their sleeve in which they must think you are deeper than they are. There is an ingenious fellow, a barber, of my acquaintance, who, beside his broken fiddle and a dried seamonster, has a twine cord strained with two nails at each end over his window, and the words "Rainy," "Dry,” "Wet," and so forth, written, to denote the weather, according to the rising or falling of the cord. 4. We very great scholars are not apt to wonder at this; but I observed a very honest fellow, a chance customer, who sat in the chair before me to be shaved, fix his eye upon this miraculous performance during the operation upon his chin and face. When those, and his head also, were cleared of all incumbrances and excrescences, he looked at the fish, then at the fiddle, still grubbing in his pockets, and casting his eye again at the twine and the words writ on each side, then altered his mind as to farthings, and gave my friend a silver sixpence. The business, as I said, is to keep up the amazement; and if my friend had only the skeleton and kit, he must have been contented with a less payment. 5. But the doctor we were talking of adds to his long voyages the testimony of some people "that has been thirty When I received my paper, a sagacious fellow took one at the same time, and read until he came to years lame." the thirty years' confinement of his friends, and went off very well convinced of the doctor's sufficiency. You have many of these prodigious persons, who have had some extraordinary accident at their birth or a great disaster in some part of their lives. 6. Anything, however foreign from the business the people want of you, will convince them of your ability in that you profess. There is a doctor in Mouse Alley, near Wapping, who sets up curing cataracts upon the credit of having, as his bill sets forth, lost an eye in the Emperor's service. His patients come in upon this, and he shows his muster-roll, which confirms that he was in his Imperial Majesty's troops; and he puts out their eyes with great success. 7. The generality go upon their first conception, and think no further: all the rest is granted. They take it that there is something uncommon in you, and give you credit for the rest. You may be sure it is upon that I go when sometimes-let it be to the purpose or not-I keep a Latin sentence in my front; and I was not a little pleased when I observed one of my readers say, casting his eye on my twentieth paper, " More Latin still? What a prodigious scholar is this man!" But, as I have here taken much liberty with this learned doctor, I must make up all I have said by repeating what he seems to be in earnest in, and honestly promise to those who will not receive him as a great man,—to wit, "That from eight to twelve, and from two till six, he attends for the good of the public to bleed for threepence." worse. DEFINITIONS.—1. Bil ́lets, notes or letters. 2. Ăğ ́gra vātes, makes Sûr felts, excesses in eating and drinking. 4. Ex erěs'çen çeş, extra growths. 6. Căt'a răcts, diseases of the eye. 7. Conçep'tion, thought. 108.-THE SPIDER AND THE BEE. JONATHAN SWIFT was born in Dublin, November 30, 1667. He was sent to school at Kilkenny, preparatory to his entering Trinity College, Dublin. His Tale of a Tub is spoken of as the wildest, wittiest, and most satirical work of the eighteenth century. He also wrote numerous other works, both in poetry and in prose, on a variety of subjects. His bestknown work, however, is Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726. His style is clear, strong, and simple, and his power of ridicule and irony, of invention and wit and apt illustration, is almost without a parallel in the literary world. He died October 19, 1745. 1. UPON the highest corner of a large window, there dwelt a certain spider swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the gates of his palace like human bones before the cave of some giant. The avenues to his castle were guarded with turnpikes and palisadoes, all after the modern way of fortification. After you had passed several courts, you came to the center, wherein you might behold the constable himself in his own lodgings, which had windows fronting to each avenue, and ports to sally out upon all occasions of prey or defense. 2. In this mansion he had for some time dwelt in peace and plenty, without danger to his person by swallows from above, or to his palace by brooms from below, when it was the pleasure of fortune to conduct thither a wandering bee, to whose curiosity a broken pane in the glass had discovered itself; and in he went, where, expatiating awhile, he at last happened to alight upon one of the outward walls of the spider's citadel, which, yielding to the unequal weight, sunk down to the very foundation. Thrice he endeavored to force his passage, and thrice the center shook. 3. The spider, within, feeling the terrible convulsion, supposed at first that Nature was approaching to her final dissolution, or else that Beelzebub, with all his legions, was come to revenge the death of many thousands of his subjects whom his enemy had slain and devoured. However, he at length valiantly resolved to issue forth and meet his fate. Meanwhile, the bee had acquitted himself of his toils, and, posted securely at some distance, was employed in cleansing his wings and disengaging them from the ragged remnants of the cobweb. 4. By this time the spider was adventured out, when, beholding the chasms, the ruins, and dilapidations, of his fortress, he was very near at his wits' end; he stormed and swore like a madman, and swelled till he was ready to burst. At length, casting his eye upon the bee, and wisely gathering causes from events (for they knew each other by sight), "A plague split you," said he, “for a giddy puppy! Is it you, with a vengeance, that have made this litter here? Could you not look before you Do you think I have nothing else to do but to mend and repair after you?"-"Good words, friend!" said the bee (having now pruned himself, and being disposed to be droll). "I'll give you my hand and word to come near your kennel no more; I was never in such a pickle since I was born." ? 5. "Sirrah," replied the spider, "if it were not for breaking an old custom in our family,-never to stir abroad against an enemy,-I should come and teach you better manners."-"I pray have patience," said the bee, 66 or you spend your substance; and, for aught I see, you may stand in need of it all toward the repair of your house.”—“ Rogue, rogue !” replied the spider. "Yet methinks you should have more respect to a person whom all the world allows to be so much your betters.”—“ By my troth," said the bee, "the comparison will amount to a very good jest; and you will do me a favor to let me |