genius could not conceal the real learning and the practical knowledge which he derived from personal observation. Borde has received hard measure from our literary historians. This ingenious scholar has been branded by Warton as a mad physician. To close the story of one who was all his days so facetious, we find that this Momus of philosophers died in the Fleet. This was the fate of a great humorist, neither wanting in learning nor genius. It is said that such was his love of the "commonwealth," that he sometimes addressed them from an open stage, in a sort of gratuitous lecture, as some amateurs of our own days have delighted to deliver, and from whence has been handed down to us the term of "Merry Andrew."-Disraeli's Amenities of Literature.

A RETORT BY DANTE.

WHEN Dante was at the court of Signore della Scala, then sovereign of Verona, that prince said to him one day, "I wonder, Signor Dante, that a man so learned as you are, should be hated by all my court; and this fool," pointing to his favourite buffoon, who stood by him, "should be by all beloved." Dante, highly piqued at this comparison, replied, “Your excellency would wonder less, if you considered that we like those best who most resemble ourselves."

BURNS IN EDINBURGH.

IT was not in the debating club of Tarbolton alone, about which so much nonsense has been prosed, that he had learned eloquence; he had been long giving chosen and deliberate utterance to all his bright ideas and strong emotions; they were all his own, or he had made them his own by transfusion; and so, therefore, was his speech. Its fount was in genius, and therefore could not run dry-a flowing spring that needed neither to be "fanged" nor pumped. As he had the power of eloquence, so had he the will, the desire, the ambition, to put it forth; for he rejoiced to carry with him the sympathies of his kind, and in his highest moods he was not satisfied with their admiration without their love. There never beat a heart more alive to kindness. To the wise and good, how eloquent his gratitude! to Glencairn, how imperishable! This exceeding tenderness of heart often gave such pathos to his ordinary talk, that he even melted commonplace people into tears! Without scholarship, without science, with not much of what is called information, he charmed the first men in a society equal in all these to any at that time in Europe.-Professor Wilson.

A DREADFUL ALTERNATIVE.

THE servant maid of the celebrated lyric poet Le Brun appearing one day before him with all his manuscripts in her hands, threatened to consign all his glory to the flames if he did not marry her. Le Brun, frightened at the imminent danger in which his verses were of being reduced to ashes, and of thus losing his hopes of immortality, sent for a lawyer immediately, and married her.

CHEERFULNESS OF MEN OF GENIUS.

MEN of truly great powers of mind have generally been cheerful, social, and indulgent; while a tendency to sentimental whining or fierce intolerance may be ranked among the surest symptoms of little souls and inferior intellects. In the whole list of our English poets we can only remember Shenstone and Savage-two, certainly, of the lowestwho were querulous and discontented. Cowley, indeed, used to call himself melancholy; but he was not in earnest, and at any rate was full of conceits and affectations, and has nothing to make us proud of him. Shakspeare, the greatest of them all, was evidently of a free and joyous temperament; and so was Chaucer, their common master. The same disposition appears to have predominated in Fletcher, Jonson, and their great contemporaries. The genius of Milton partook something of the asperity of the party to which he belonged, and of the controversies in which he was involved; but, even when "fallen on evil days and evil tongues," his spirit seems to have retained its serenity as well as its dignity; and in his private life, as well as in his poetry, the majesty of a high character is tempered with great sweetness, genial indulgence, and practical wisdom. In the succeeding age our poets were but too gay; and though we forbear to speak of living authors, we know enough of them to say with confidence, that to be miserable is not now, any more than heretofore, the common lot of those who excel.-Jeffrey.

ST. SIMEON STYLITES, HERMIT OF THE PILLAR.

IN the monastery of Heliodorus (a man sixty-five years of age, who had spent sixty-two years so abstracted from the world that he was ignorant of the most obvious things in it) the monks ate but once a day; Simeon joined the community, and ate but once a week. Heliodorus required Simeon to be more private in his mortifications; "with this view," says Butler, "judging the rough rope of the well, made of twisted palm-tree leaves, a proper instrument of penance, Simeon tied it close about his naked body, where it remained, unknown both to the community and his superior, till such time as it having ate into his flesh, what he had privately done was discovered by the effluvia proceeding from the wound." Butler says that it took three days to disengage the saint's clothes, and that "the incisions of the physicians, to cut the cord out of his body, were attended with such anguish and pain, that he lay for some time as dead." After this he determined to pass the whole forty days of Lent in total abstinence, and retired to a hermitage for that purpose. Bassus, an abbot, left with him ten loaves and water, and coming to visit him at the end of the forty days, found both loaves and water untouched, and the saint stretched on the ground without signs of life. Bassus dipped a sponge in water, moistened his lips, gave him the eucharist, and Simeon by degrees swallowed a few lettuce leaves and other herbs. He passed twenty-six Lents in the same manner. In the first part of a Lent he prayed standing; growing

weaker, he prayed sitting; and towards the end, being almost exhausted, he prayed lying on the ground. At the end of three years he left his hermitage for the top of a mountain, made an inclosure of loose stones, without a roof, and having resolved to live exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, he fixed his resolution by fastening his right leg to a rock with a great iron chain. Multitudes thronged to the mountain to receive his benediction, and many of the sick recovered their health. But as some were not satisfied unless they touched him in his inclosure, and Simeon desired retirement from the daily concourse, he projected a new and unprecedented manner of life. He erected a pillar six cubits high (each cubit being eighteen inches) and dwelt on it four years; on a second of twelve cubits high he lived three years; on a third of twenty-two cubits high, ten years; and on a fourth of forty cubits, or sixty feet high, which the people built for him, he spent the last twenty years of his life. This occasioned him to be called Stylites, from the Greek word stylos, a pillar. This pillar did not exceed three feet in diameter at the top, so that he could not lie extended on it; he had no seat with him; he only stooped or leaned to take a little rest, and bowed his body in prayer so often that a certain person who counted these positions found that he made one thousand two hundred and forty-four reverences in one day, which if he began at four o'clock in the morning and finished at eight o'clock at night, gives a bow to every three-quarters of a minute; besides which he exhorted the people twice a day. His garments were the skins of beasts, he wore an iron collar round his neck, and had a horrible ulcer in his foot. During his forty days' abstinence throughout Lent, he tied himself to a pole. He treated himself as the outcast of the world and the worst of sinners, worked miracles, delivered prophecies, had the sacrament delivered to him on the pillar, and died bowing upon it, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, after having lived upon pillars for six-and-thirty years. corpse was carried to Antioch, attended by the bishops and the whole country, and worked miracles on its way.—Hone's Every-Day Book.

DR. BARROW AND THE EARL OF ROCHESTER.

His

MEETING at court one day Rochester with mock politeness thus accosted the witty divine: "Doctor, I am yours to my shoe-tie;" to which Barrow rejoined," My lord, I am yours to the ground;" followed by Rochester with, "Doctor, I am yours to the centre;" to which the doctor returned, "My lord, I am yours to the antipodes." Rochester, scorning to be foiled by a piece of musty divinity, as he termed Barrow, replied, "Doctor, I am yours to the lowest pit of h-1;" whereupon Barrow, turning on his heel, quietly observed, "There, my lord, I leave you !"

THE OLD ENGLISH HOUSEWIFE.

NEARLY two centuries and a half ago, Gervase Markham wrote a very useful and entertaining tract entitled, "The English Housewife,

containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman. As her skill in physic, surgery, cookery, extraction of oyles, banquetting stuffe, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines, conceited secrets, distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp, flax, making cloth, and dyeing;-the knowledge of dayries, office of malting oates, their excellent uses in a family, of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household."

LORD AND LADY BYRON.

WRITING of Lady Byron before marriage, Mr. Harness says, "Miss Milbank was not without a certain amount of prettiness or cleverness; but her manner was stiff and formal, and gave one the idea of being self-willed and self-opinionated. She was almost the only young, pretty, well-dressed girl we ever saw who carried no cheerfulness along with her. I seem to see her now, moving slowly along her mother's drawing-room, talking to scientific men and literary women, without a trace of emotion in her voice, or the faintest glimpse of a smile upon her countenance. A lady who had been on intimate terms with her from their mutual childhood, once said to me, 'If Lady Byron has a heart, it is deeper seated and harder to get at than anybody else's heart I have ever known.""

As a contribution to the Byron controversy, the evidence given by Mr. Harness as to Byron's peculiar idiosyncrasy is not without importance :- Byron had one pre-eminent fault,- -a fault which must be considered as deeply criminal by every one who does not, as I do, believe it to have resulted from monomania. He had a morbid love of a bad reputation. There was hardly an offence of which he would not, with perfect indifference, accuse himself."

After reading the story set afloat by Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Harness professed himself utterly shocked that such a scandal should have been circulated by a lady, and utterly incredulous as to its possessing any real basis. "He said that he had heard the charge long before; that it arose out of the publication of ' Manfred,' but that it was as untrue as it was revolting. He reiterated what he had before said of Byron's love of romancing and of exaggerating his dissipations, and that he was encouraged to such rhapsodies by the serious interpretation his wife put upon them." She took seriously every word he uttered, weighed it in her precise balance, and could not refrain from expressing her condemnation of his principles and her abhorrence of his language. This fanned the flame, increased his irritation, or added zest to his amusement. Whatever crime she accused him of, he was not only ready to admit, but to trump by the confession of some greater enormity." Probably the solution of many of the puzzles which occur in Byron's career lies in the remark Mr. Harness makes as the result of deliberate consideration, and with full knowledge of the circumstances of the case,- "There can be no doubt that Byron was a little maddish."--Literary Life of Rev. Mr. Harness.

A MAN OF GREAT IDEAS.

SENECIO was a man of a turbid and confused wit, who could not endure to speak any but mighty words and sentences, till this humour grew at last into so notorious a habit or disease as became the sport of the whole town. He would have no servants but huge, massy fellows; no plate nor household stuff, but thrice as big as the fashion. You may believe me, for I speak it without raillery, his extravagancy came at last into such a madness, that he would not put on a pair of shoes, each of which was not big enough for both his feet. He would eat nothing but what was great, nor touch any fruit but horse plums and pound pears. He kept a mistress that was a very giantess, and made her walk too always in chioppins, till at last he got the surname of Senecio Grandio.-Cowley's Essays.

DESCRIPTION OF A "FAIR AND HAPPY MILKMAID."

A FAIR and happy milkmaid is a country wench that is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of hers is able to put all face physic out of countenance. She knows a fair look is but a dumb orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellencies stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge. The lining of her apparel (which is herself) is far better than outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the silkworm, she is decked in innocency, a far better wearing. She doth not, with lying long abed, spoil both her complexion and conditions. Nature hath taught her too immoderate sleep is rust to the soul: she rises therefore with chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made haycock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. She bestows her year's wages at next fair; and in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and beehive are all her physic and chirurgery, and she lives all the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none yet, to say the truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not palled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste that she dare tel them only a Friday's dream is all her superstition; that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she; and all her care is that she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her windingsheet.-Sir Thomas Overbury.

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