Luigi, 'I am rather of opinion that it cut sharp because it was of strongly-tempered steel.' Yes, yes; Paternosters may shave clean, but they must be said over a good razor.

San Giovanni be praised! a blind Florentine is a match for two one-eyed men.

The cat couldn't eat her mouse if she didn't catch it alive, and Bratti couldn't relish gain if it had no taste of a bargain.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Deh! what are we sinners doing all our lives? Making soup in a basket, and getting nothing but the scum for our stomachs.

The secret of oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying things with a certain power that moves the hearers-without which, as old Filelfo has said, your speaker deserves to be called, 'non oratorem, sed aratorem.' And, according to that test, Fra Girolamo is a great orator.

Spiritual blasts break no walls down. But the Frate wants to be something more than a spiritual trumpet: he wants to be a lever, and what is more, he is a lever.

I measure men's dulness by the devices they trust in for deceiving others. Your dullest animal of all is he who grins and says he doesn't mind just after he has had his shins kicked.

There is as wonderful a power of stretching in the meaning of visions as in Dido's bull's hide. It seems to me a dream may mean whatever comes after it. As our Franco Sacchetti says, a woman dreams over-night of a serpent biting her, breaks a drinking-cup the next day, and cries out, 'Look you, I thought something would happen-it's plain now what the serpent meant.'

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Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

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If a prophet is to keep his power, he must be a prophet like Mahomet, with an army at his back, that when the people's faith is fainting it may be frightened into life again.

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Many of these halfway severities are mere hotheaded blundering. The only safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are too heavy to be avenged.

If a man incurs odium by sanctioning a severity that is not thorough enough to be final, he commits a blunder.

Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of novità, who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we

should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattered.

I think all lines of the human face have something either touching or grand, unless they seem to come from low passions.

There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.

Father, it is a great gift of the gods to be born with a hatred and contempt of all injustice and meanness. Yours is a higher lot, never to have lied and truckled, than to have shared honours won by dishonour. There is strength in scorn, as there was in the martial fury by which men became insensible to wounds.

It is strange this life of men possessed with fervid beliefs that seem like madness to their fellow-beings.

You talk of substantial good, Tito! Are faithfulness, and love, and sweet grateful memories, no good? Is it no good that we should keep our silent promises on which others build because they believe in our love and truth? Is it no good that a just life should be justly honoured? Or, is it good that we should harden our hearts against all the wants and hopes of those who have depended on us? What good can belong to men who have such souls? To talk cleverly, perhaps,

and find soft couches for themselves, and live and die with their base selves as their best companions.

It is only a poor sort of happiness, my Lillo, that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much-feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man can be great-he can hardly keep himself from wickedness--unless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo-you know why I keep to-morrow sacred; he had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It would have been better for me if I had never been born.'

Thou art not like the herd of thy sex, my Romola : thou art such a woman as the immortal poets had a vision of when they sang the lives of the heroestender but strong, like thy voice, which has been to me instead of the light in the years of my blindness.

Blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams of thought backward along the already-travelled channels and hindering the course onward.

Yes, inanis'-hollow, empty-is the epithet justly bestowed on Fame. . . . Inanis? yes, if it is a lying fame; but not if it is the just meed of labour and a great purpose.

It is too often the 'palma sine pulvere,' the prize of glory without the dust of the race, that young ambition covets. But what says the Greek? 'In the morning of life, work; in the mid-day, give counsel; in the evening, pray.'

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What hired amanuensis can be equal to the scribe who loves the words that grow under his hand, and to whom an error or indistinctness in the text is more painful than a sudden darkness or obstacle across his path? And even these mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar thing— even they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with that insight into the poet's meaning which is closely akin to the mens divinior of the poet himself; unless they would flood the world