the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion."

And, once more, listen to the historian : "The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen Elizabeth, but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw 'Othello' performed at the Globe Theater, remarked that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. Thou hast reason,' replied a great Lord, according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-legged animal with feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The inflection spread to the national conscience. Political double dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay flowers of literature?—There was a dead silence. -I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding house. Do not plead my example. If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We have done with them.

-If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? -I should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum over chasms that shrewd people can bestride without such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker Hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, that couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand truth,— not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas. Some of

the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater any more than that of a good chess player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his fore foot, at the expression, "his relations with truth as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him.

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, as you understand it. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of things or persons. A man who is willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one's self. On the whole, I had rather judge men's minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other. It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior mind that held a different one. How many of our most cherished beliefs are like those drinking glasses of the ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of mora, in which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and the other matches or misses the number, as the case may be, with his own. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an instrument is to playing on it.

-What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can retire that like.

When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another

To cheat the cunning tempter's art,

And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.

A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;

And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.

On hill and prairie, field and lawn,

Their dewy eyes upturning,

The flowers still watch from reddening dawn

Till western skies are burning.

Alas! each hour of daylight tells

A tale of shame so crushing,

That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.

But when the patient stars look down

On all their light discovers,

The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

They try to shut their saddening eyes,

And in the vain endeavor

We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.

What do you think of these verses, my friends? Is that piece an impromptu? said my landlady's daughter. (Et. 19. Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, Junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says, "Yes?" when you tell her anything.)- Oui et non, ma

petite, Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses were

written offhand; the other two took a week, that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C'est le DERNIER pas qui coute. Don't you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know how to manage it. One would think

they had been built in your parlor or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking, stern foremost, into their "native element," the great ocean of outdoors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above. Here, turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," I said, "you can pour three gills and three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside down for a thousand years."

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that of verses, copy which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top leathers to an old pair of boot soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.

youth morning

truth

warning.

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbor.

When a young female wears a flat circular side curl, gummed on each temple, — when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers, and when she says

"Yes?" with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging

manner.

66

"I was only giving some hints on the fine arts."

"Yes?"

- It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own lady baskets. When I fling a Bay State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A blanket shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.

-We are the Romans of the modern world, the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civilized society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress :

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries. Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound.

Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."

-Self-made men? Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. Are Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from