istence-tasteless, vapid, unrefreshing, unstimulating, as, slaking your thirst with distilled water, or eating viands, tasteless in themselves, without salt? Yet this is often a result of middle life, ay, and of a life which a man or woman shall have led without real blame or wickedness. One hope, then, only, must be ever present with us, and should be all-sufficing-but is it? Notwithstanding our prayers, our acknowledgments once-a-week of sin and repentance, do we cling to this hope? If so, it assuredly will save, and atone to us for all the bitter evils of this our everyday world.

Some people say their thorns arise from the sorrows of other people. I cannot say I believe it, unless human nature resembled more (which it does not yet) that Divine Example who, under human guise, did make the griefs of others His own. A few angelic natures, indeed, still wander about this world, who do feel the woes of others most acutely-in fact, as they tell us themselves, even as their own; but then my readers, such feelings of pity, of sympathy, cannot be thorns; they are transmitted into roses of deathless odour, and makes fragrance in the breasts where they arise.

p thorn to bear, despite of care and kind- | does it improve us? What does it make of exlavished on its sufferings? I think so. Next after temper and vice, I believe poverty produces the most sharp and piercing thorns, begh not, perhaps, the most enduring. What tara so lacerating as to owe money? to be in the power of another person? to be rated, abused, seed, and insulted, and to own you have no power of retaliation? If a rightly-thinking perdebtor must also feel guilty. The fallacy of wing Poverty as a goddess incarnate, a state of painless martyrdom, is becomloded. Perhaps, on the other hand, we prone to deem wealth the sole panacea irl evils; but I am inclined to believe that mmpetence and pecuniary ease tend very much more to render people loving and loveable, than that griping, chronic pang of poverty which has suured so many bright temperaments, which has ground and crushed so many aspiring and noble pants, blighting wholesome affections, poisoning domestic peace and tranquillity, and which can never be productive of repose, happiness, or even religious feeling unless there is a certain insensibility to all mundane trials. And when I speak of Poverty, I do not mean even that degree which must feed on bread and water, and wear threadbare clothes, merely existing on the smallest pittance, free from debt or any other care-but of that far more bitter state, in which, to in even bread, the head must be held omers above the waters, even though in momentary peril of sinking for ever. Never to know freedom from the claims of the tar-gatherer, the landlord, the petty debts of which necessity compelled the contraction; as you pay with one hand to know a yet more pressing claim is waiting on the other; turn where you may, if you leave Scylla on your right, grim Charybdis glares on you from the left; to behere that, strive as you may, these claims can Lever be settled but in one way (viz., by paying yourself that debt which will one day be enforced)-this, I say, is the state in which the roses have long ago all perished, but the thorns are evergreen, vigorous, and flourishing. Let Some friendly hand plant them over your grave, a defence to the last shelter earth can afford. Perhaps the keenest thorn of all, is the thought that will force itself-"I might in the cset have prevented this." Hope is a fair angel, but too often she is a delusive syren Devertheless. She sings and chaunts fictitious lays which are never realized, but which you, miserable self-deluder, listen to for truths.

You got into debt first in the hope, amounting to a positive certainty, that you would be able by such and such means to pay all you owed; and those means turned as unrealizable as the fairy-money which changed from gold to dead leaves and dust. But you are again and again deceived by the whisperings of this "Hope," and only after many trials you cast away your idol into outer darkness and believe in her no more. "And the last state of that man is worse than the first," A hopeless life! who can live it? To what does it tend? How

We all remember, I dare say, the thorns which certain misguided and mistaken men and women (more desirous of bread, perhaps, than fame-though a little of that sugar eats very well with your bread and butter) inflicted some months back on the editor of a leading periodical. Poor women, of the class unprotected, who had old mothers and little brothers depending on them-other unfortunates, all committing the deplorable mistake of resting their claims to notice on misfortune, rather than on the literary merits of the articles they offered for insertion. But, to my poor thinking, that gifted editor turned the invading thorns against the very hearts of his persecutors, when he so unhesitatingly exposed to public criticism their appeals. True, no names were afforded; but how the sting must have rankled, as the poor eager victims scanned the last pages of theand saw themselves there held up in the sight of a pseudo pity and sympathy, which carried derision on the very face of its commiseration. Ah! the stereotyped "declined, with thanks" would have been encouragement, compared to the "show-up," which was amusement to the many, but the death of foolish, cherished hopes to the struggling few. Not that I would for a moment insinuate that an author's manuscript should be accepted because the writer happens to want money. No! It is not an unwise impulse, rely on it, which directs the successful man of letters to crush and exterminate rickety bantlings, as they are said to destroy in China a large proportion of the female infants, because they are likely to prove more burthensome than useful. We should else swarm with articles more rapid and inane than those contained in the Lady's Magazine for 1779, now in my hand; trash and twaddle, more nauseating than the ipecacuana draughts the doctor gives for

my cough, brought on by the easterly winds., wife, and five children, could not be dishonoured But let us be merciful to these twaddlers, our great-grandmothers and grandmothers, now resting peacefully where, let us hope, literary pre-eminence is set at nought as the vainest and most futile of all earthly distinctionspioneers, after all, of a pre-eminence which, in this nineteenth century, few women at any rate you in; and the readers of the claim for the pen. They had, too, this advan-have complained more than once of the heavi tage over us of the present generation-the sup-ness of the mental food set before them, food ply of writers was inadequate to the supply of cooked, too, by professional hands, and spiceda readers: else why the insane homage rendered and salted to order. to Fanny Burney, and one or two others, who could write pages, to be read without positively yawning over them?

I say these remembrances alone would be enough to disturb the rest, peace, and digestion of anyone as sensitively alive to human sympa thies as all literary eminent men are so wel known to be. To lift out your hand to a drowne ing wretch might be dangerous, he might pul already

So that, absolutely, if we can make our beds even of the rose leaves, you see we are certain still to get our share of the thorns; and happy are we if, when lacerated beyond bearing, we can cast away the flowers which make them tolerated, and not miss them as necessary to our daily welfare. If you, in possession of competence-nay, affluence, can so ill bear the occasional brambles incident to your human condition, think what it must be to toil in unthankful paths of labour, where there lurks no flower, even in perspective, to brighten the future; nothing but hard, remorseless, unprofitable toil for daily bread--bread which even a breath, a word, a look may at any time deprive you of,

food, the half-loaf, which to so many perishing hundreds is still better than none.

After all, perhaps the thorns which lacerated that tender editorial breast might derive more poignancy from reminiscences of a youthful time, when its possessor sought likewise the favours of editors and publishers. Not long, doubtless, had the genius which penned such keen and vivid pages to wait for recognition, though, indeed, publishers and editors both are often duller-witted about other people's productions than outsiders give them credit for, and even genius is not always to be considered. A man or woman may write on the wrong side of the question, or may now and then hazard re-regretted only as the labour which yields scanty marks unpleasing to literary autocrats. But, however success may at last crown the meridian of life, we must all struggle hard if we would win the bays and laurels, which have thorns just like the roses. Men are not born editors with ever so many thousands per annum, and I am sure that to peruse the nonsense of nine amateur writers out of ten is worth thousands instead of hundreds, being (as any publisher's reader will tell you) enough to harden the heart and rive the brain; so that before the grub became the bright, etherialized butterfly, there may, doubt less, have been times when it was not easy to pay a tailor's bill, or to meet that piece of paper which had been accepted by your dearest friend Jones, and which, for the sake of Jones, his

Think of these things, and be thankful, you, oh prosperous reader, who hold so many roses, if even a few thorns prick your fingers now and then; and, above all, let us not rebel, because they mix with all flowers worth having. A Crown of Thorns consummated on Calvary the glory of the world. As the Divine brow was goaded and pierced with the diadem which had been woven in mocking wrath, that crown read the lesson to future ages, that the thorns should bring out from mankind, amidst the follies, temptations, and trials of the world, the higher virtues of fortitude, endurance, forgiveness, trust, and submission.

MR. REGINALD'S BRINDLED DOG.

BY LOUIS SAND.

It was a regular Christmas night, sharp and cold, with a sprinkling of snow on the ground. I had been with one of the under-keepers to the county town to see the Christmas show of meat, all decked out with garlands and ribbons and holly branches; and as his house was on my way home, I did not refuse to turn in and have a chat with him.

The fire was comfortably tempting; by-andbye another friend or two came in, and the keeper produced a jug of ale, and invited us to be merry. I dont suppose we needed much in

vitation, as everybody knows there is something exhilarating about the word Christmas; and as for me, the sight of all those goodly shops lighted up and filled with preparations for the season, together with the row of human facessome eager, some jolly, but all expectant-which were looking into them; had raised my spirits wonderfully. It seemed to me a thing to be grateful for, that we should have such a season to look forward to, enjoy, and look back upon; a season when even the melancholy man puts off his melancholy, and the world shuts up its