stand a chance of being sole student in our own circle. It matters not how trifling the specialty, if a man only knows something that nobody else knows, the world will respect him. Only be an authority upon beetles, or even sea-weeds, and you may have small Latin and less Greek, you may know nothing of literature, and be grossly in the dark on politics, and it may all tend to your honour. If you know absolutely nothing else, how much you must know about beetles! It is a case of concentration of the powers, of force of will, of single aim, of that ardent, indomitable pursuit of knowledge which is passion. And this is, perhaps, only a caricature of the truth-a truth of which, in an age of new sciences and perpetual discoveries, it is a comfort to be reminded that a wise man must, after all, be content to be ignorant of many things.

FOOLISH THINGS.

THE subject of folly is a wide one. Mr Buckle's sixteen volumes would hardly exhaust its various manifestations; what, then, can be expected in a single page? But it is also attractive. Nobody is disinclined to have his belief in the universality of folly confirmed by a new instance, every one is ready to speculate on the motive or want of motive of ridiculous human action. But the foolish things we have here set ourselves to speak of are not attractive. They furnish food for anything rather than amused supercilious analysis. Are there any of our readers who never in their own persons say or do foolish things-who are never conscious of having been deserted by their good genius? If there are, we do not write for them. It is one's own foolish things which at present engage our attention, for which we assume the sympathy of fellowfeeling, and reckon on touching an answering chord in other breasts not a few. We are not speaking now of grave errors and mistakes, but of the inadvertencies,

weaknesses, and follies which haunt our subordinate, social, man-fearing conscience; which we may not know to have been perceived by any but ourselves, but which nevertheless affect us, not because they are wrong, but silly, and because they may be thought more silly by others even than by ourselves, which leave a sense of self-betrayal, making us ask in bitterness

"Who shall be true to us

When we are so unsecret to ourselves?"

They are the things which allow us to go to sleep at night with an undisturbed conscience, but wake us with a start hours before the dawn, and set us wondering-How could I make such a fool of myself? Where was the impulse to that vain show-off? What could have induced me to talk of such a one-to confide my private concerns to So-and-so? For it may be noted that sins of omission play but a small part in this periodical tragedy. It is not lost opportunities, but heedless ill-considered speech and action, that fret us at unseasonable hours-some thoughtless licence of the tongue, perhaps, or some passing vanity leading to misplaced confidence and weak reliance on sympathy. In the young, the fear of presumption is a fruitful yet innocent source of these stings of memory. Young people are sometimes made uneasy for days from the notion of having committed some unwarrantable familiarity, which under excitement seemed, and very likely was, perfectly natural.

We are advised to sleep upon certain designs, but it

means really to wake upon them. Nothing is more curious than the revulsion a short interval makes in our whole view of things—no magic more bewildering than the transmutations which a few hours of insensibility produce a few hours of being thrown absolutely upon ourselves. What an idea it gives us of the effect of association, of the action of man upon man! Nobody can allow himself to be real and natural in his intercourse with others, and at the same time act as he laid himself out beforehand to act, or as he wishes (we may too often say), on looking back, that he had acted. If this is true in the solemn and weighty affairs of life, it must of necessity be true in the light or less responsible contact of society, where the little turns and accidents. of the hour are constantly throwing us off our rules, and tempting us to ventures and experiments. All wit, all repartee, all spontaneous effervescence of thought and fancy are of the nature of experiment. All new unplanned revelations of self-all the impulses, in fact, which come of collision with other minds in moments of social excitement, whether pleasurable or irritatingare apt to leave qualms and misgivings on the sensitive and reflective temperament. Thus, especially, sins against taste fret us in the heavy yet busy excitable hour which we have fixed on for the levee of these spectres, when our thoughts, like hounds, scent out disagreeable things with a miraculous instinct, drag them to light, fly from subject to subject, however remote and disconnected, and hem us round with our own peccadilloes. Society in the cold dawn looks on

us as a hard taskmaster, exacting, unrelenting, seeing everything, taking account of everything, forgetting nothing, judging by externals, and holding its judgments irreversible. For, after all, it is a cowardly time. We are not concerning ourselves now with bonâ fide penitence, but only with its shadow and imitation— a fear of what people will think, a dread of having committed ourselves, whose best alleviation lies in empty resolutions of dedicating the coming day to a general reversal or reparation of yesterday, to a laborious mending and patching, which is to leave us sadder and wiser men; along with a certain self-confidence (also the offspring of the hour) that if we can only set the past to rights, rectify, explain, recant effectually, our present experience will preserve us from all future recurrence of even the tendency and temptation to do foolish things. We own this to be cowardly. It is fortunate that we cannot mould ourselves on the model of these morbid regrets; for the influences which make us seem to ourselves so different in the rubs of domestic and social life from our solitary selves-so that we are constantly taking ourselves by surprise-are not all bad ones. They may be more unselfish than those which impel to remorse, and make us feel so sore against ourselves. There is a certain generous throwing of one's self into the breach in some crisis, whether grave or gay, which often brings us to grief. There is a certain determined devotion to the matter in handa resolution, come what may, to carry a thing throughwhich is better than caution, though by no means a

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