emotions? When the spirits are languid and weary, do we like to think how bright they were in other days; the hope how buoyant, the sympathies how ready, the enjoyment of life how keen and eager? So they fall-the buds of prime, the roses of beauty, the florid harvests of summer-fail and wither, and the naked branches shiver

in the winter.

Indifference of the World.

The world can pry out everything about us which it has a mind to know. But there is this consolation, which men will never accept in their own cases, that the world doesn't care. Consider the amount of scandal it has been forced to hear in its time. and how weary and blasé it must be of that kind of intelligence. You are taken to prison, and fancy yourself indelibly disgraced? You are bankrupt under odd circumstances? You drive a queer bargain with your friends, and are found out, and imagine the world will punish you? Pshaw! Your shame is only vanity. Go and talk to the world as if nothing had happened, and nothing has happened. Tumble down; brush the mud off your clothes; appear with a smiling countenance, and nobody cares. Do you suppose society is going to take out its pocket-handkerchief and be inconsolable when you die? Why should it care very much, then, whether your worship graces yourself or disgraces you.self? Whatever happens, it talks, meets, jokes, yawns, has its dinner pretty much as before.

Lackeys and Footmen in the Last Century.

Lackeys, liveries, footmen-the old society was encumbered with a prodigious quantity of these. Gentle men or women could scarce move without one, sometimes two or three vassals in attendance. Every theatre had its footmen's gallery; an army of the liveried race hustled round every chapel-door. They swarmed in anterooms, they sprawled in halls and on landings, they guzzled, devoured, debauched, cheated, played cards, bulied visitors for vails [or gratuities]. That noble old race of footmen is well-nigh gone. A few thousand of them may still be left among us. Grand, tall, beautiful, melancholy, we still behold them on levee days, with their nosegays and their buckles, their plush and their powder. So have I seen in America specimens, nay, camps and villages, of Red Indians. But the race is doomed. The fatal decree has gone forth, and Uncas with his tomahawk and eagle's plume, and Jeames with his cocked-hat and long cane, are passing out of the world where they once walked in glory.

The English Country Gentleman.

To be a good old country gentleman, is to hold a position nearest the gods, and at the summit of earthly felicity. To have a large unencumbered rent-roll, and, the rents paid regularly by adoring farmers, who bless their stars at having such a landlord as His Honour; to have no tenant holding back with his money, excepting just one, perhaps, who does so just in order to give occasion to Good Old Country Gentle man to shew his sublime charity and universal benevolence of soul; to hunt three days a week, love the sport of all things, and have perfect good health and good appetite in consequence; to have not only a good appetite, but a good dinner; to sit down at church in the midst of a chorus of blessings from the villagers, the first man in the parish, the benefactor of the parish, with a consciousness of consummate desert, saying, 'Have mercy upon us miserable sinners,' to be sure, but only for form's sake and to give other folks an example:-a G. O. C. G, a miserable sinner! So healthy, so wealthy, so jolly, so much respected by the vicar, so much honoured by the tenants, so much beloved and admired by his family, amongst whom his story of Grouse in the gun-room causes laughter from generation to generation; this perfect being a miserable sinner! Allons done! Give any man good health and temper, five thousand a year, the adoration of his parish, and the love and worship of his family, and I'll defy you to make him so heartily dissatisfied with his spiritual condition as to set himself down a miserable anything. If you were a Royal Highness, and went to church in the most perfect health and comfort, the parson waiting to begin the service until your R. H. came in, would you believe yourself to be a mi serable, &c.? You might. when racked with gout, in solitude, the fear of death before your eyes, the doctor having cut off your bottle of claret, and ordered arrowroot and a little sherry-you might then be humiliated, and acknowledge your shortcom

ings and the vanity of things in general: but in high health, sunshine, spirits, that word miserable 'is only a form. You can't think in your heart toat you are to be pitied much for the present. If you are to be miserable, what is Colin Plonghman with the ague, seven children, two pounds a year rent to pay for his cottage, and eight shillings a week? No, a healthy rich, jolly country gentleman, if miserable, has a very supportable misery; if a sinner, has very few people to tell him so.

The following passage in The Four Georges' is one of the most striking and affecting in our literature:

Death of George the Third.

All history presents no sadder figure than that of the old man, blind and deprived of reason, war dering through the rooms of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, reviewing rancied troops, holding ghostly courts. I have seen his picture as it was taken at this time. hanging in the apartment of his daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg-amidst books and Windsor furniture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown his snowy beard falling over his breast-the star of his famous Order still idly shining on it. He was not only sightless: he became utterly deaf All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God were taken from him. Some slight lucid moments he had; in one of which the queen, desiring to see him, entered the room, and found him singing a hymn, and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. When he had finished, he knelt down and prayed aloud for her. and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself. that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then burst into tears, and reason again

fled.

What preacher need moralise on this story; what words, save the singlest are requisite to tell it? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch supreme over empires and republics, the inserntable Dispenser of life, death, happiness, victory. O brothers" I said to those who heard me first in America- O brothers! speaking the same dear mother-tongue-O comrades! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a trace to battle! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest; dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne: buffeted by rude hands; with his children in revolt; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries: Cordelia. Cordelia, stay a little !"

Vex not his ghost-Oh, let him pass !-he hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.'

Hush! strife and quarrel, over the solemn grave; sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy.

We add one specimen of Thackeray's verse, which differs very little from his prose: the colour and flavour are the same.

The Ballad of Bouillabaisse.

A street there is in Paris famous,
For which no rhyme our language
yields,

Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name
is-

The New Street of the Little Fields;
And here's an inn, not rich and splendid,
But still in comfortable case;
The which in youth I oft attended.
To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.

For two years (1860–62) Thackeray conducted the 'Cornhill Magazine,' and in the pages of this popular miscellany appeared his Roundabout Papers'-a series of light graceful essays and sketches; also two novels, Lovel the Widower,' and 'Philip on his Way through the World,' which were scarcely worthy of his reputatio . He had commenced another story, Dennis Duval,' of which four nouinly portions were published; and he contemplated Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Anne, as a continuation of Macaulay's History. All his schemes. however, were frustrated by his sudden and lament

able death. His health had long been precarious, and on the day preceding his death he had been in great suffering, Still he moved about; he was out several times,' says Shirley Brooks, and was seen in Palace Gardens, Kensington, reading a book. Before the dawn on Thursday (December 24, 1863) he was where there is no night.' Never more,' said the Times,''shall the fine head of Mr. Thackeray, with its mass of silvery hair, be seen towering among us.' He had died in bed alone and unseen, struggling, as it appeared, with a violent spasmodic attack, which had caused the effusion on the brain of which he died. The medical attendants who conducted the postmortem examination stated that the brain was of great size, weighing 58 ounce.. Non omnis mortuus est. He will be remembered,' says James Hannay, for ages to come, as long as the hymn of praise rises in the old Abbey of Westminster, and wherever the English tongue is native to men, from the banks of the Ganges to those of the Mississippi.'

REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY.

As a novelist, poet, theologian, and active philanthropist, Mr. Kingsley, Rector of Eversley, Hampshire, and Canon of Westminster, was one of the most remarkable and meritorious men of his age. His views of social reform verge upon Chartism, and, in some instance, are crude and impracticable in the present state of society; but his zeal, disinterestedness, and unceasing perseverance in seeking to remedy evils which press upon the working classes, no one doubts or questions, while the genius he brought to bear on his various duties and tasks reflects honour on our literature. Mr. Kingsley was a native of Devonshire, born at Holne Vicarage, near Dartmoor, in 1819. He studied at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and intended to follow the profession of the law. He soon, however, abandoned this intention, and entered the church, obtaining first the curacy, and then the rectory of Eversley, which he has invested with affectionate interest and celebrity. Mr. Kingsley's first appearance as an author was in 1844, when he published a collection of Village Sermons'-plain, earnest, useful discourses. He has published several other volumes of sermons and lectures; but it is from his imaginative works that Mr. Kingsley derives his chief fame. In 1848 he appeared as a dramatic poet, author of The Saint's Tragedy,' or the story of Elizabeth of Hungary, Landgravine of Thuringia, and a saint of the Romish calendar. This poem is a sort of protest against superstitious homage and false miracles, but it gives also a vivid picture of live in the middle ages, and is animated by a poetical imagination.

His next work was one of fiction-'Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: an Autobiography,' two volumes, 1849. The design of this tale is to shew the evils of competition and the grievances of the artisan class. The hardships which drove Alton to become a Chartist, and his mental struggles as he oscillated between infidelity and religion are pow

erfully depicted, though the story is in some respects a painful one, and in parts greatly exaggerated. Mr. Kingsley's remedy for the evils of competition and the tyranny of masters in large towns is the adoption of the associative principle among the workmen―combining capital and labour-and in the case of the tailors and a few other trades, the scheme was tried. The same social topics are discussed in Mr. Kingsley's 'Yeast, a Problem,' 1851, which is devoted more particularly to the condition of the agricultural labourers, and is written with a plainness and vehemence that deterred fastidious readers. Mr. Kingsley put his views into a more definite shape in a lecture on the Application of Associative Principles and Methods to Agriculture,' published also in 1851. But in this tract the author's denunciation of large towns and mill-owners, and his proposal to restore the population to the land, are erroneous both in theory and sentiment. The earth,' he says, hath bubbles, and such cities as Manchester are of them. A short-sighted and hasty greed created them, and when they have lasted their little time, and had their day, they will vanish like bubbles.' Such Christian Socialism' as this would throw back society into ignorance and poverty, instead of solving the problem as to the rich and the poor. Phaethon, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers,' 1852, and Hypatia, or New Friends with an Old Face,' 1853, were Mr. Kingsley's next works.

These were followed by a series of lectures, delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, on Alexandria and her Schools,' 1854; and in the following year our author took a higher and more genial position as a man of letters by his novel of Westward Ho !' and his delightful little treatise of Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore.' In his Westward Ho!' Mr. Kingsley threw himself into the exciting and brilliant Elizabethan period, professing to relate the 'Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth; rendered into modern English by Charles Kingsley.' Here we have Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, and the other great names of Devonshire once more in action; we have adventures in the Spanish Main and South American continent, the memorable chase and defeat of the Spanish Armada, the plots of Jesuits, the pride of Spaniards, English burghers, Puritans, seamen, and soldiers-an endless variety of incidents and characters, with descriptions of scenery which for rich colouring and picturesqueness have rarely been surpassed. Believing that the Protestantism of the Elizabethian age was, all-important to the cause of freedom as well as true religion, Mr. Kingsley gives no quarter to its opponents, and has marred the effect of parts of his narrative by frequent and bitter assaults on the Romish Church. In the delineation of passion-especially the passion of love, as operating on grave and lofty minds like that of Amyas Leigh Mr. Kingsley is eminently successful. He is n.ore intent on such moral painting and on the development of character, than on