without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite :-come with me into a Quaker's Meeting.

Dost thou love silence deep as that 'before the winds were made'? go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed, self-mistrusting Ulysses :-retire with me into a Quaker's Meeting. . . . . . Frequently it is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness.-O, when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself for a quiet half-hour upon some undisputed corner of a bench among the gentle Quakers. Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tranquil and herd-like-as in the pasture-' forty feeding like one.'-The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsunconferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.

2. The Scotchman.

I CANNOT like all people alike. I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the

experiment in despair. They cannot like me-and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. They beat up a little game and leave it to knottier heads to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting; waxing and again waning.... They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath.... they are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it.... The brain of a true Caledonian is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth, if indeed they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order.... His riches are always about him.... You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian.... The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox-he has no doubts. Is he an infidel-he has none either . . . . He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions His taste never fluctuates.

with him, for he sets you right.

His morality never abates.... You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected

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person in an enemy's country. A healthy book,' said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle. 'Did I catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book.' Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr.After he had examined it minutely I ventured to ask him how he liked My Beauty, (a foolish name it goes by among my friends) when he very gravely assured me, that he had considerable respect for my character and talents' (so he was pleased to say) 'but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions'.... Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth which nobody doubts.... I was present not long since at a party of North Britons where a son of Burns was expected, and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way) that I wished it were the father instead of the son, when four of them started up at once to inform me that 'that was impossible, because he was dead.'

3.

The Beggar.

POOR man reproaches poor man in the street with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better; while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascal, comparatively, insults a beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none,

any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captive, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar.

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession-his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on Court mourning. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The fluctuations of prosperity at worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe.

THE Scene where Ordella offers her life a sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to Calantha in the 'Broken Heart.' She is a piece of sainted

nature. Yet, noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner of it, compared with Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself in a sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one another like a running-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between Fletcher and Shakspeare is the fondness of the former for unnatural and violent situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of his most admired tragedies show this. Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of Fletcher is excellent, like his serious scenes, but there is something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her.-Shakspeare chose her without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and length of days, with her for a dowry.