a busy physician to find sufficient time to collect a cabinet that a college was thankful enough to receive, and the enjoyments of his life were increased many fold.

I have known others to acquire a taste for flowers; not cultivated flowers merely, but the charming wild flowers with which God has made the wayside and the meadow to blossom. I recollect meeting, some years since, a delightful old gentleman, wearing the plain and neat Quaker dress. He had acquired a handsome property in business, and was devoting most of his time to benevolent objects. Wherever he went he carried a little, convenient flower case with him, and whenever his quick eye fell upon a new blossom, or even an old one if particularly attractive, he gathered it as a great prize, and with marked pleasure added it to the treasures of his case. He seemed to know each flower by name; all about its habits, and almost to be able to hold conversation with it.

I shall not soon forget the great pleasure an eminent physician exhibited when shown a very large elm-tree. He had his tape measure out of his pocket at once to measure it. It proved to be a giant in circumference, and all the facts about it were carefully noted down in his diary. He was acquainted with very nearly every large tree in the state, and every interesting circum

stance connected with them. He was familiar with all the different species of trees, and every

grove and forest he passed through afforded him inexpressible delight in their examination.

The reason why we do not feel the same enjoyment in these things is, that we have never become acquainted with all the interesting facts about them; just as when a stranger comes into the place where we live, we feel but very little interest in him at first, but after we are introduced to him and become fully acquainted with him we wish to be in his society as often as possible. It will add more to our enjoyment in life, whatever our business or profession may be, than can be told in words, to have some one branch of science or nature so well understood as to enable us to perceive all

that he had discovered by long and careful observation about the grasshopper.

One may live a very busy life, and may not have much money to expend, and still surround himself with many objects of interest and profit. A merchant in Boston, doing a very large business, found time, and no ordinary pleasure, in the work besides, to collect in his library copies of nearly all the different editions of the Bible that have been published since the invention of the art of printing; and another gentleman who began life poor, a leather dresser, who continued in his trade until his death, improved his mind and his taste in reading during all his leisure moments, and by economy secured one of the largest and most valuable private libraries in the country.*-B. K. Peirce, D.D.

THE TENACIOUSNESS OF THE TURKS. I CONFESS that this contempt of the Franks, which the Turks do not disguise, gave me much of the earth, have not bowed the knee before pleasure. They at least, among all the nations the idol of progress. Firm in the faith of their and if they do recognize the existence of the fathers, they calmly ignore Western civilization; Occidental, it is only to despise him, and not to ape him and thereby lose their own personality,

which has been the fate of so many nations who have become the victims of Western propagandism and Western ideas. At Constantinople, or, at least in Stamboul, you feel that you, a Frank, do not exist in the eyes of the Turk. You may wear the largest check suit that a London tailor can produce, and yet the Turk will pass without deigning even to look at you. At the public fountains he will go through all his religious ablutions in your presence as if you were miles away. He will spread out his carpet, turn his face towards Mecca, and say his prayers while you are looking on; and so mean For this dignity and stability of character I reare you in his estimation that he ignores you. spect the Turk; and I am grateful to him for procuring me a sensation which is not common in foreign travel, in Europe at any rate-the sensation that I am an intruder, a contemptible dog, a person worthy only to be spat upon and killed. Happily, the diplomatic relations which the Sublime Porte still entertains with the Western world guarantees the material security of the traveler in the Sultan's dominions. But every thing in Constantinople tells us that the Turk, although he has now been living in Europe for centuries, is still a nomad

*New York: Hunt & Eaton. Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe.

MADAME DE SEVIGNE.

CHASTE and true in an age of unchastity and treachery, frank and natural in an age of duplicity and preciosity, Madame de Sévigné was not so much the darling of her own generation as of all the generations that were to come; and yet it would be an egregious blunder to suppose that she was not greatly beloved by her own contemporaries. We love her better than they only because through her letters-of which, outside of two or three persons, they had but a few—we know her heart better than they. Possessed of a cheerful temper, a keen insight, a ready wit, and a hearty affection for all her friends, her society was courted in her time by the best and greatest men and women, among whom she moved on terms of perfect though unassuming equality.

And what a time it was! What a period of efflorescence for French genius! Great generals, Condé and Turenne; great statesmen, Mazarin and Colbert; great philosophers, Descartes and Malebranche; great dramatists, Corneille, Racine, Molière; great preachers, Bossuet, Massillon, Bourdaloue; great moralists, Pascal and the Port Royal School; a great critic, Boileau-Despréaux; a great fabulist, La Fontaine ; a great maxim-writer, La Rochefoucauld; great ladies, influential in society, politics, literature, Madame de Rambouillet, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Madame de Longueville, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Maintenon, all flourished in the life-time of Madame de Sévigné, all are mentioned in her letters, and many of them were among her inti

mate friends.

That not only the blue blood of rank but the pure blood of character ran in the veins of this Marchioness de Sévigné, is attested by the fact that her father's mother was the famous saint, Jeanne Fremiot, Baroness de Rabutin-Chantal, the friend and helper of Saint Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva. Bereaved of her husbandthe Baron de Rabutin-Chantal, who was killed while out hunting-but possessed of a rare capacity for devotion and enthusiasm, this great lady dismissed her retinue of servants, gave away her plate and jewelry, and determined to

•Summer Holidays. New York: Harper and Brothers. J-May.

spend the rest of her life in works of piety and charity, such as she believed would form the most acceptable service to God. After many difficulties and trials she found tranquillity under the spiritual direction of the celebrated Bishop of Geneva, who appears to have been peculiarly adapted to help and stimulate to their best work all those who depended upon him. She took the habit of a nun, and having passed through a period of probation, in which, on account of her good works, she became known as the Saint of Monthelon, was asked by the good bishop to be "charity, and the love of Jesus Christ, found a religious order whose only rule should " and whose object should be to care for the poor and sick. She gladly obeyed, and all the remaining years of her life were devoted to founding the order of Nuns of the Visitation. Her death at an advanced age occurred in December, 1641, while she was making a winter journey through France to visit a few among the eighty-seven convents she had established. She was canonized as Saint Chantal in 1767.

vances

Though most of Madame de Sévigné's letters display her as a woman who mingled freely with the world and enjoyed gay society, yet there is traceable in them an undercurrent— rising more and more to the surface as she adin years-of other-worldliness, and sometimes of true religious fervor, a fondness for good sermons and religious treatises, and especially a marked partiality for the nuns of St. Mary's-all distinc ly due to the influence of allusions in the letters. Madame de Sévigné, this pious grandmother, as is seen by frequent in fact, showed equal devotion and enthusiasm ; but instead of dedicating those powers to God and Saint Francis, she consecrated them to her

first born child. "Mine," she writes to her daughter, "is what the devotees call a habitual thought; it is what we ought to feel for the Divine Being, were we to do our duty. Nothing can divert me from it*." -Edward Playfair An

derson..

QUAKERS AND PURITANS.

THE Quakers knew very well, what was so rife in England, that there was in Massachusetts a rule of the most oppressive and unrelenting severity both in civil and religious administration. The English Court and Council had been beset by the complaints of sufferers, and one might meet in the streets with those who, in telling their grievances, would bitterly portray the harshness, bigotry, and cruelty of "the rule of the Saints." The Quakers, by tests satis actory

Chicago: A. C McClurg and Company,

to themselves, trusted themselves in distinguish ing between the promptings of mere inclination and ordinary motives, and their direct impulses, monitions, and inspirations from God. They were "free" or "not free" to do this or that. Their own wills were held or controlled by a power outside of them. The Puritans and Quakers, with equal sincerity and fidelity, acknowledged this controlling sway over them, with this extremely diverse source of it: with the Puritan it was the letter of the Bible; with the Quaker it was the illumination of the spirit. The Quakers could judge when they had a divine call to go or stay, to wander or abide in their places. They affirmed that they came here in "the moving of the Lord." Messages also were committed to them to be communicated, and few of these were agreeable to those who received them. They had "burdens of the Lord," to be relieved only by denunciations of judgments and calamities. Under this divine prompting, successive Quakers, single or in companionship, were "moved of the Lord to go to Boston," there to confront the authorities and to bear testimony against the austerities and formalism, literalism, deadness, and rottenness of Puritanism. They had large, free, liberalizing, and benedictive truths and principles to announce. They were well aware what a reception they would meet, and what treatment they would receive; and they were well prepared for it. They would be blameless and harmless in their relation to civil law, nonresistant under violence; would pay no fines, swear no oaths, make no pledges, yield no willing obedience to unjust commands, and bear their testimony till conscience within gave them a full discharge.

Such was the Quaker's view of their errand and duty here. Most faithfully and heroically did they discharge it. Their minds and consciences had been opened to what they believed to be the shameful and startling fact that the religion of their times, which pretended to stand for Christianity, was the merest sham and hypocrisy. The plainest teachings and doctrines of Jesus Christ, like nonresistance to evil, unworldliness, seriousness of life, simplicity of speech, a prohibition of war, offensive or defensive, were with a cool effrontery pronounced to be only "counsels of perfection" utterly impracticable in actual life. The Quakers set themselves to carry out those counsels of perfection, and to allow that the very least portion of literal Christianity is impracticable of obedi

ence.

In the spirit of sincerity, of fidelity, constancy, and purity, which animated and guided

them, the Friends, as a fellowship, have come the nearest, both in spirit and in practice, to conformity with the Christian rule of life, of all the sects which have borne the title of disciple. Had they, here or elsewhere, sought to establish a theocracy, unlike that of the Puritans, it would have found its model in the New Testament, not in the Old.*-George E. Ellis.

A TOUCH OF NATURE.

WHEN first the crocus thrusts its point of gold
Up through the still snow-drifted garden mold,
And folded green things in dim woods unclose
Their crinkled spears, a sudden tremor goes
Into my veins and makes me kith and kin
To every wild-born thing that thrills and blows.
Sitting beside this crumbling sea-coal fire,
Here in the city's ceaseless roar and din,
Far from the brambly paths I used to know,
Far from the rustling brooks that slip and shine
Where the Neponset alders take their glow,
I share the tremulous sense of bud and brier

And inarticulate ardors of the vine.†

-Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

KING CHARLES AND HIS FRIENDS. WE open this morning upon times when New England towns were being planted among the pine woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not over-sturdy in his friendships-a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.

In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who, by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel" plays the braggadocio of the court; he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the

He was that Steenie who in

*The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

The Sisters' Tragedy. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his High-Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He made the times hard for Nonconformists; your ancestors and mine, if they emigrated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and intensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which Buckingham had already provoked in the political world; and the days of wrath were coming.

This Archbishop Laud is not only keensighted but he is bountiful and helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great, fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of wonderful attractions has made his appearance at St. Paul's-down on a visit from Cambridge-a young fellow, wonderfully handsome, with curling locks and great eyes full of expression, and a marvelous gift of language; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him; and finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford; appoints him presently his own chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland. This priest of such eloquence and beauty was Jeremy Taylor.*-Donald G. Mitchell.

RHETORICAL STYLE OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

WITH respect to French style, we can imagine the astonishment of an English author, practiced in composition, and with no previous knowledge of French literature, who should first

*Lands, Letters, and Kings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

But why? The cause of this national immunity from a fault so common everywhere else, and so natural, when we look into the producing occasions, is as much entitled to our notice as the immunity itself. The fault is inevitable, as one might fancy, to two conditions of mind—hurry in the first place, want of art in the second. The French must be liable to these disadvantages as much as their neighbors; by what magic is it that they evade them or neutralize them in the result? The secret lies here; beyond all nations, by constitutional vivacity, the French are a nation of talkers and the model of their sentences is molded by that fact. Conversation, which is a luxury for other nations, is for them a necessity; by the very law of their peculiar intellect and of its social training, they are colloquial. Hence it happens, that there are no such people endured or ever heard of in France as alloquial wits; people who talk to, but not with, a circle; the very finest of their beaux esprits must submit to the equities of conversation, and would be crushed summarily as monsters, if they were to seek a selfisʼn mode of display, or a privilege of lecturing any audience of a salon who had met for purposes of social pleasure. "De monologue," as Madame de Staël, in her broken English, described this mode of display when speaking of Coleridge, is so far from being tolerated in France as an accomplishment, that it is not even understood as a disease.

In France, therefore, the form of sentence in use is adjusted to that primary condition; brief, terse, simple; shaped to avoid misunderstanding, and to meet the impatience of those who are waiting their turn. People who write rapidly, everywhere write as they talk: it is impossible to do otherwise. Taking a pen into his hands, a man frames his periods exactly as he would do if addressing an audience. So far the Englishman and the Frenchman are upon the same level. Suppose them, therefore, both preparing to speak: an Englishman in such a situation has no urgent motive for turning his thoughts to any other object than the prevailing one of the