that are least disposed to exhibit their talent | magnificent stock to dispose of. I can only that way. Boileau designates Madame de la say, that age has already an effect on the Fayette as la femme de France qui avait vigor of my pen; none on yours: it is not, le plus d'esprit et qui écrivait le mieux; "I assure you, for you alone, but my ink is at yet cette personne has the repute of haïssant | low-water-mark for all my acquaintance." surtout d'écrire des lettres, insomuch that Horace Walpole's ink at low-water-mark in only a very few, and they very brief, of her the '45! If so, it was only because it had epistles or notelets survive: "c'est dans not begun to rise, and the mark in question celles de Madame de Sévigné plutôt que dans was the à quo, not the ad quem. It is well les siennes qu'on la peut connaître." for those of us who prize him as the prince Madame de Sévigné's daughter seems to have of letter-writers in his peculiar genre, that disrelished the part, that is to say no part, Horace was fibbing right and left when he or next to none, played by La Fayette in pretended to hate letter-writing. But for the performance: "Voyez, voyez ! votre his letters, what would he be to this generaMadame de la Fayette vous aime-t-elle donc | tion? si extraordinairement? elle ne vous écrirait all authorities, the observed of all observers pas deux lignes en dix ans ; elle sait faire ce of the politics and personalities of the eightqui l'accommode, elle garde ses aises et son eenth century. repos," and Gourville is reported to have written on the same sore subject in the same strain, only plus malicieux. Madame de la Fayette's declaration is well known: "Si j'avais 'un amant qui voulût de mes lettres tous les matins, je romprais avec lui." Sentimental fair ones, who indulge in a plurality of sheets (crossed) and an indefinite series of postscripts, may object,

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Others of a more restrained habit will perhaps undertake to vouch for her,

With them, he is an authority with

Probably, however, the correspondence of every man and woman of note would furnish proof, if searched into, of frequent if not permanent distaste for letter-writing. Gleim, good old father Gleim, was a rara avis, a strange old bird, in the mania that possessed him for writing and being written to. Some of his juniors will account him to have been a "very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upwards"-for to those years he attained-when he indulged so profusely in epistles to people he scolded for being less liberal in their replies. William Taylor's "Nay, but she'll keep her word!" description of Gleim is, that he had a loving We find even Madame d'Arblay seized by a heart, a house always open to literary guests, lasting fit of what she calls "writing- and a passion for corresponding with all his weariness," and pressing on one remonstrant acquaintance, especially with young men the forbearance in general of her other of letters in whom he anticipated rising friends, who, she says, when they understood genius. "His scrutoire has been edited; that writing was utterly irksome to her, and it abounds with complaints that his except as a mere vehicle to prevent uneasiness friends are less fond of writing useless on their part, and to obtain intelligence on epistles than himself, and were one by one hers, concurred not to make her silence still letting drop an intercourse, which amused more oppressive to her than her writing, by his leisure, but interrupted their industry." a kind reception of a few words, and giving The German Anacreon became de trop with her back letters for notes. Horace Walpole | his exactions on his friends; soothes his conscience by the persuasion that letter-writing is one of the first duties that the very best people let perish out of their rubric; and, so early as 1744, avows that every day grows to make him hate writing more. In 1745 he asks Sir Horace Mann, of all loves, "How do you contrive to roll out your patience into two sheets? You certainly don't love me better than I do you; and yet if our loves were to be sold by the quire, you would have by far the more

"Poor Anacreon, thou grow'st old," they might say; and treat him accordingly. Southey, in one of his early letters, attributes to "those intervals of vacancy which must occur in the best directed solitude," what he calls "the epistolary mania in very young persons. This was my own case once," he adds: "I wrote not from a fulness of matter to communicate, but from sheer emptiness day after day-foolscap sheets, and close writing, for three pages, and the top and

bottom of the fourth. More knowledge, and are not, by dozens probably, the only "paperthe daily increasing consciousness of how sparing" correspondents on record.) And much yet remains to be learnt, more em- Sydney Smith writes to "Dear Mrs. Crowe, ployments, and marriage, have long since I quite agree with you as to the horrors of cured me. My pleasure now consists in correspondence. Correspondences are like receiving letters, not in writing them." Mr. small clothes before the invention of susDisraeli's Contarini Fleming is, indeed, only penders; it is impossible to keep them up." a type of youthful passion for letter-writing, Not altogether a lady's simile, or in severe at that stage of the young German's college clerical keeping; but Sydney Smith knew life when he inundated Musæus with floods what he was about when simile-making, of penmanship daily: "But the letters with and was a clergy-man and lady's man too. which I overwhelmed him-these were the If that of the suspenders is not very like the most violent infliction-what pages of mad broad cloth without, 'tis marvellously like eloquence!-solemn appeals, bitter sarcasms, the broad man within, whose breadth of infinite ebullitions of frantic sensibility. For drollery few can resist and nobody can deny. the first time in my life I composed. I grew Looking over an accumulation of old letintoxicated with my own eloquence." Most ters-what a strange mixture of feelings that of us, in some degree or other, have been induces-heart-sickness too often predomi"overtaken" by this intoxication, for at nant as one sighs "Ah, for the change 'twixt least once in a way, in our time-though now and then!" The author of "Michael (perhaps, and well-a-day!) long, long since de Mas" touchingly depictures the world"That time is past; hardened Gold-Finder examining a collection of these saddening memorials :

And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures."

"He opened it, and face to face arose

The dead old years he thought to have es-
caped,

All chronicled in letters; there he saw
Answers to some of his, containing doubts
Long since become negations; some again
Encouraging resolves of his, long broke,
And, as he thought, forgotten;--not a leaf
But marked some downward step. O in
our life

There are no hours so full of speechless woe
As those in which we read, through misty
eyes,

Letters from those who loved us once; of whom

Some have long ceased to love at all-the hand

That traced the fond warm records still and
cold-

The spirit that turned to ours, long lost to all
That moves, and mourns, and sins upon the

As surely, on the other hand, we have come, at a later day, to know what it is to shrink from a plurality of sheets, and a change of pens, and an extra outlay in postage stamps, when pursuing this once-cherished occupation-when fulfilling as a duty what was, of yore, an overmastering passion. Every one must have experienced, who has lived long enough, something of the feeling which Charles Lamb humorously expresses when he says, that a philosophical treatise is Fanting of the causes of the backwardness with which persons, after a certain time of life, set about writing a letter. "I always feel as if I had nothing to say, and the performance generally justifies the presentiment." In the same epistle occurs the memorable avowal: "A full pause here comes upon me as if I had not a word more 'eft I will shake my brain. Once! twice!" I have a little packet," says the author of -nothing comes up. George Fox recom- Dream-Life," not very large, tied up mends waiting on these occasions. I wait. with narrow crimson ribbon, now soiled. Nothing comes. "Professor Wilson with frequent handling, which, far into told me," says Mr. Samuel Warren, "that some winter's night, I take down from its there were two things he specially hated," nook upon my shelf, and untie, and open, of which, letter-writing was the first. ("As and run over with such sorrow and such joy, for letter-writing," adds the Queen's Counsel, "I never received from him but one in my life and that was written on half a sheet of paper, evidently the blank sheet of some old letter." Pope and Madame d'Arblay

earth;

And some, O! sadder that, by us estranged,
Still live, still love, but live for us no more."

such tears and such smiles, as I am sure make me for weeks after a kinder and better man. There are in this little packet letters in the familiar hand of a mother. What gentle admonition!--what tender affection!

God have mercy on him who outlives the We must conclude. Yet not with the tears that such admonitions and such affec- writing of the dead? With a fragment, tion call up to the eye! There are others then, not savoring of mortality, but suffiin the budget, in the delicate and unformed ciently in tone with the penseroso in these hand of a loved and lost sister-written latter extracts: it shall be one of Mrs. when she and you were full of glee, and the Browning's beautifully rendered Sonnets best mirth of youthfulness. Does it harm from the Portuguese-a story in itself, 'you to recall that mirthfulness? or to trace though one of a series : again, for the hundredth time, that scrawling postscript at the bottom, with its i's so carefully dotted, and its gigantie t's so carefully crossed, by the childish hand of a little brother?""

Well says Sir Bulwer Lytton, in his last, best novel,-"My Novol" he rightly dubbed it, kar εloym,—that a thought written in warm, sunny life, and then suddenly rising up to us, when the hand that traced, and the heart that cherished it, are dust-is verily as a ghost. "It is a likeness struck off the fond human being, and surviving it. Far more truthful than bust or portrait, it bids us see the tear flow, and the pulse beat. What ghost can the churchyard yield to ús like the writing of the dead?"

My letters! all dead paper . . . mute and

white!

And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the
string

And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said. . . . he wished to have me in his
sight

Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand. a simple thing.

Yet I wept for it!-this, the paper's light-
Said, 'Dear, I love thee;' and I sank and

quailed

·

As if God's future thundered on my past:
This said, I am thine '-and so its ink has
paled

With lying at my heart that beat too fast:
And this
O Love, thy words have ill

availed,

If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! '' something very melancholy in reading through a is very interesting; and, at the same time, there is series of the most unreserved letters, beginning with the hopes and projects of early life, relating is heir to, and concluding by a few lines in a differ in their progress the joys and sorrows which flesh ent hand, and on a black-edged paper, announcing manhood to old age, I had become thus intimately the death of the person with whose concerns, from acquainted."

Southey thus writes to his son-in-law, after going through the papers and letters of the late Dr. Bell, with a view to publication: "As you may suppose, these papers contain much of the romance of real life, and a full share of its tragedy. It is an affecting thing to read continuously through an unreserved correspondence of twenty, thirty, or forty years, ending with a black-bordered And again, to Mrs. Hughes (June 16, 1883): announcement of the writer's death; affect-me by the perusal of poor Dr. Bell's papers, to These feelings are brought home to ing it would be in a book, still more so in which I daily devote two hours before breakfast. the letters themselves the He had preserved the whole of his correspondence lettersvery for nearly fifty years, and much of it I have found which have been written and received with very interesting. Commencing with the formation such emotions of pleasure and of grief." * of his friendship in India, relating the prospects, hopes, fears, and fortunes of his friends from that *Southey appears to have been deeply im- time, till a different handwriting and a black seal pressed with this consideration in the instance of concludes the series." Dr. Bell's letters of a lifetime. He recurs to it again and again, with other of his correspondents. Thus to Mrs. Bray of Tavistock:

Mr. Cuthbert Southey and Mr. Wood Warter must each have been feelingly alive to this reflection, in editing for the press the some time Lau

"There is a vast mass: in fact the whole corre-reate's own correspondence. spondence of more than fifty years. Much of this

THE ORIGIN OF THE TAPE-WORM. This worm, for the fishing of which from the human stomach we published an illustrated description in vol. x. Scientific American, is described in the Paris Gazette Medicale to have its origin as follows: "The Hebrews are never troubled with it, and dogs that are fed on pork are universally so afflicted; in fact, it turns out that

a small parasite worm, called 'crysteceras,' (from two words signifying a small sect and a tail, which much affects pork,) no sooner reaches the stomach than, from the change of diet and position, it is metamorphosed into the well known tape-worm; and experiments upon a condemned criminal have established the fact beyond all contradiction."

From Chambers' Journal.

MR. THACKERAY ON THE FOUR

GEORGES.

to relent towards gentle women and innocent children, and all who love and cherish them.

the

George I., who came to the British throne THE success of Mr. Thackeray, in his lec- at fifty-four, is sketched as a coarse proflitures on the Humorous Writers of England, gate, whom England was, glad to accept, has very naturally led to his preparing a with all his mistresses, as a political conseries on the first British sovereigns of the venience, and to make the best of. We House of Hanover, which, after delivering must pass from him to come to his son, them with great approbation, and we trust second George, who commenced his reign by, profit, in America, he is now beginning to burning his father's will," under the astonbring before home audiences. He com- ished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury." menced with Edinburgh and Glasgow in the This was also a prince of low tastes and course of the past month, addressing in each habits. His court was scarcely an improve case multitudes to be numbered, not by hun- ment upon that of Charles II. He had only dreds, but by thousands. It was verily a the good sense to leave the government to remarkable sight. In the huge Music Hall Sir Robert Walpole, who, with gross vices of the Scottish capital is seen an acre-breadth and faults, gave England peace for thirty of the human face divine-the intelligent years, and kept the funds at par, Dull and countenances of the middle and upper classes dissolute as the king was, he had the one of a city noted for its cultivation of litera- good quality of bravery. When Prince ture and science. In the front of a great Charles Stuart was at Derby, and many orchestra appears the lecturer, flanked with were looking grave, the royal countenance judges, clergymen, professors, authors, magis- never changed for a moment. [Perhaps, as trates, and distinguished citizens, and backed Mr. Thackeray admires bravery, reconsidby a mass of people rising to the very ceil-eration might lead him to expunge the ing. A tall and bulky man of five-and-phrase "that scamp," as applied to the forty, with bushy hair nearly white, sur- prince who ventured, with 5000 half-armed mounting a set of manly but pallid features, Highlanders, to march so far south as Derby.] begins to speak, and for an hour perfect George had also some sentiment towards his silence awaits his voice, as he reads, with queen and his German subjects. varying tones, from the paper lying on the "His letters are said to have been fasdesk before him. What a compliment to a cinating. Indeed, he wrote sentimental British author, this vast, and in some re-letters of thirty pages from Germany to the spects brilliant gathering, drawn at once by queen, and from London, on his return, to interest about his person, and expectation the German friends he left; and, if he judged of the intellectual treat he is to give them! men by a low standard, a dismal experience Surely it cannot now be said that an author told him he was right, and there was nothing is of little account among us. Where are a minister like Walpole could tell him calthe men who get higher compliments paid culated to alter this estimate. The Germans them? used to say of him when young: 'He is wild, but fights like a man.' So he did at Dettingen, where, like a dapper little hero, he brandished his sword in the face of the whole French army. Upon public festivals ever after, he wore the suit he had on at Dettingen, and the people-to whom such honest pride is pleasant-laughed kindly when they saw the odd old garments, for bravery is never out of fashion." *

In each of his four lectures, Mr. Thackeray dispatches a George, not detailing his history, but sketching his personal character, his way of life, and surroundings, all in language the most pithy and epigrammatic that can be conceived. The general strain is satiric. In his hands, the courtliness which formed the atmosphere of the monarch in his lifetime is revenged. A century in which sovereigns and oligarchies were every thing and the people nothing, is tried in the balance and found wanting. Every here and there, however, the stern moralist lapses into those tendernesses which form so prominent a beauty in his novels. He never fails

Mr. Thackeray's sketch of Queen Caroline, the one dignified figure of the court, is most charming. Wise, calm, gentle, affable

*Our extracts are almost verbatim from the Edinburgh newspapers (Scotsman and Daily Express), and can only be understood as an approximation to the lecturer's words.

to all, she cherished in her heart an unac- cassocked harpies, ever hanging round the countable attachment to an unworthy hus- back-stairs of the palace, ready to fawn or band, who revered, while he was unfaithful bribe themselves into bishoprics; women to her. "Save this husband, she cared for intriguing, and courtiers bowing down in no living being. She loved her children too; solemn reverence before the picture of the but, to please the king, she would have king and queen, sneering at her lady-inchopped them all up into little bits. She waiting holding the basin to her on her laughed at his terrible jokes, even when she knees; the very air stifled one with a siekly was pained both at body and heart. Caro- perfume. There are some absurd ceremonies line's attachment was something quite ex- about our court at the present day," said traordinary. What charm had the red- Mr. Thackeray; "but, as an Englishman faced little princeling, for whom she had looking at the past, shall I not acknowledge rejected one who was to be an emperor, the change that has taken place? What a over her? When suffering from gout, contrast does such a court and such a she used to bathe her feet in cold water, at monarch present to that in England now! risk of her life, to walk with him; and The mistress of St. James' passes me to-day; accompanied him through life with one and there I see at once the good mother, the unbroken, unselfish, uncomplaining love. good queen, the accomplished lady, the enWhy was this? Who can unravel the in- lightened friend of art, the tender sympascrutable mystery of a woman's heart? thizer with the glories and griefs of her Few can forget the dreadful death-bed scene, people!" At this passage, as might be as told in Hervey's Memoirs-more dark and expected, there were loud and prolonged hideous in its dreadful humor than the cheers. gloomiest painting of Swift-more terrible in The lecture on the third George, notwithits satire than the bitterest page of Field-standing the difficulty presented by the wide ing-with bishops hanging around and extent of the subject, was generally acanointing her, while her one thought was knowledged to be superior to its two prefor that wretched little foul-mouthed cor-decessors. There were sketches of George poral, who, after kissing her, and crying Selwyn and his bon-vivant chaplain Warner, over her, went off to sin yet more. At the both admirable. The Earl of Carlisle was solemn promise which he made the queen selected as a specimen of the respectable before she died, and the incidents of the nobility, comparatively little dipped in the scene, we cannot but laugh even in the debaucheries of the time. As to the luxury, presence of death, and that with the very the idleness, the dissipation, the vices, the saddest of hearts. But the state-parson lecturer called on his audience to remember must bring out his commonplaces-his ap- what it was to be one of a set of people paratus of black hanging-and, whether the possessed of great wealth, high rank, and king be dead or alive, pronounce him 'good nothing to do but enjoy. The bad example and gracious,' as scoundrel-kings have been of George II. told years after his reign had pronounced in England for the last three ended; but the good example of George III. hundred years. It would hardly be credible gradually effected an improvement of manthat Dr. Young, the celebrated author of ners. After all "It is to the middle Night Thoughts, absolutely burst into tears classes," said the lecturer, "that we must in the pulpit, because the defender of the look for what is good in the society of faith and dispenser of bishoprics fell asleep England in those days, the working educated during one of his long sermons about the man, away from Lord North's bribery in the heavens and stars, and other things of that senate; the active clergy, not corrupted into class. No wonder that, amidst all this parasites by hopes of preferment; the tradeslevity in high places, Wesley left the in- men rising into opulence; painters pursuing sulted temple to worship on the hillside. their gentle art; men of letters in their I venerate those men," said Mr. Thackeray, quiet study-these are the men we love and "who lifted up a protest against the spirit like to read of in these days. How small of the time and the court. One was scared the grandees and men of pleasure look beside as they looked around at this society-at them! How contemptible the story of this flaunting vice. What with shoals of George III.'s court squabbles beside the