up and then disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distraction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and 'to-morrow will be odious from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of things. It takes the firmest hold of weak, flimsy, and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and those like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself is not the less so for standing alone.-HAZLITT.

XII.

OUR hearts acquiesce, too, in the

dispensation which, instead of creating character in its perfection, leaves it to be perfected by effort. We can conceive no character in a created being worthy of affection, which is not produced by a moral struggle; and on the other hand, the greater the moral difficulties that have been overcome, the more worthy of affection does the character seem. Try to conceive a being created morally perfect without effort; you will produce a picture of insipidity which no heart can love.-GOLDWIN SMITH.

XIII.

A CRITIC should be a pair of

snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher, and not seldom a thief!-Guesses at Truth.

XIV.

'TIS the good reader that makes the good book :-a good head

cannot read amiss; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else, and unmistakably meant for his ear.-R. W. EMERSON.

XV.

INWARD evermore,

To outward,-so in life and so

in act,

Which still is life.

E. B. BROWNING.

XVI.

Cant.

OF all the cants that are canted in

this canting world, though the

cant of hypocrisy be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most despicable.

XVII.

BOSSUET says of Anne de Gon

zagua, that she possessed all

the virtues whereby Hell is peopled. -(Oraison Funebre.)

XVIII.

BE comforted: perhaps there is

some island of the blest where

there will be no occasion for pushg. Once this happened to me,

that a great, fierce, obdurate crowd were pushing up in long line towards a door which was to lead them to some good thing; and I, not liking the crowd, stole out of it, having made up my mind to be last, and was leaning indolently against a closed-up side door, when all of a sudden this door opened, and I was the first to walk in, and saw arrive, long after me, the men who had been thrusting and struggling round me. This does not often happen in the world, but I think there was a meaning in it.-SIR A. HELPS (C. of S.)

XIX.

TWO persons can hardly set up

their booths in the same quarter

of Vanity Fair, without interfering