over the little hand that "all the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten;" great Caesar speaks anew in fresh young tones, and falls at Pompey's feet with wondering "Et tu, Brute!"; smooth-spoken Brutus makes his appeal to "Romans, countrymen and lovers," over the body of his murdered friend; and stern Mark Antony takes up the tale, and sways the fickle people to his will. Many another spirit of Shakesperean days "doth still revisit the glimpses of the moon." And each and all of them touch, with their gentle magic, the children who recall them-magic unfailing and unforgotten. In after days, the stage presented to their view may not be quite what one would wish: but all honour to the hands that hold the standard high in the beginning, when the young mind is wax to receive, and marble to retain." M. A. CURTIS. SUNDRY SAYINGS ABOUT READING N one of its colossal self-advertisements the Times newspaper sprinkled the pages of its brochure with the praises bestowed by a great many noteworthy people on the habit of judicious reading. A good many of these remarks need certain limitations. For instance, Pliny the Younger tells us that Pliny the Elder said that no book was so bad but that it contained something profitable to read. Perhaps so, but not counterbalancing the danger of reading it in that place. Better keep away from the bad altogether. There may be a beautiful passage in a bad book; but you will not plunge into a dangerous quagmire to gather a lily that is growing in the middle of it. In the first saying quoted by the Times Oliver Wendell Holmes uses a simile which Lord Byron had used more appositely. "When I want a book, it is as a tiger wants a sheep. I must have it with one spring, and, if I miss it, I go away defeated and hungry." Byron says in one of his letters: "I cannot furbish. I am like a tiger-if I miss the first spring, I go growling back to my den. But if it succeeds, it is a crusher." "Books instruct us calmly, and without intermingling with their instruction any of those painful impressions of superiority, which we must necessarily feel from a living instructor. They wait the pace of each man's capacity; stay for his want of perception, without reproach."-Sir Egerton Brydges. "I would rather be employed in reading than in the most agreeable conversation."-Pope. Many times the reading of a book has made the fortune of the man-has decided his way of life."-Emerson. "Even those who are resolved to read only the better books are embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless."— Frederic Harrison. "The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented."-Sir John Herschel. (And in its worst one of the most terrible instruments of corruption.) "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."—Earl Iddesleigh (Sir Stafford Northcote). "There is no pleasure so cheap, so innocent, and so remunerative as the real, hearty pleasure and taste for reading." -Lord Sherbrooke (Robert Lowe). "Even a common auctioneer's catalogue of goods and chattels, suggests a thousand reflections to a peruser of any knowledge; judge then what the case must be with a catalogue of books."-Leigh Hunt. "It you want to understand any subject whatever, read the best books upon it you can hear of."-Ruskin. "It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds; and these invaluable communications are within the reach of all."-Countess de Genlis. "The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one." -Goldsmith. "By reading, we acquaint ourselves with the affairs, actions and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations and in the most distant ages; and that with ease as though they lived in our own age and nation."-Isaac Watts. "Try for yourselves what you can read in half a hour. Then multiply the half-hour by 365, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of a year; and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you for a lifetime." -John Morley. "The process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense, an exercise."-Walt Whitman. "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."William Goodwin. "It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old."-Leigh Hunt. "Without the love of books the richest man is poor; but endowed with this treasure of treasures, the poorest man is rich."-J. A. Langford. "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. "At the head of all pleasures which offer themselves to the man of liberal education, may confidently be placed that derived from books."—John Aikin. spirit. A good book is the precious life-blood of a master "-Milton. If a man of ability should give you his honest experience, you would find that he owed more impulse to books than to living minds."-Emerson. "The love of literature awakens every faculty, refines every sentiment, and elevates every emotion."-John Morley. "A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history."-Henry Ward Beecher. "When I open a noble volume, I say to myself, 'Now the only Croesus that I envy is he who is reading a better book than this.'"-Philip Gilbert Hamerton. "A man must select good books, such as have been written by right-minded and strong-minded men, real thinkers."William Ellery Channing. "I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books, than a king who did not love reading."-Macaulay. "The light of the sun, the day, and life itself, would be joyless and bitter if I had not good books to read."-Leo Allatius. "All the known world, excepting the savage nations, is governed by books."-Voltaire. (Your own among the very werst.) "Books are the first and last, the most home-felt, the most heart-felt of all our enjoyments."-Hazlitt. VOL. XXXIV.-No. 391. ON TALLAGHT HILL A PLEASANT hill is Tallaght Hill, On five fair counties if you will. To me it was a pleasant place, In sunshine or in cloudy weather, When my true love and I together Would wander there at easy pace. Amongst the ferns and foxgloves tall, And through the fairy mushroom rings, Past green woods where the blackbird signs And notes of wood-doves lonely fall. As upwards willingly we pressed (Ah me! it was a pleasant place), And told us we were near the crest. There hand in hand we two looked down Where, white upon the silver sea, The little yachts now rose, now fell; In solemn tones the Angelus Bell Rang peace across the grassy lea. A pleasant hill is Tallaght Hill, In sunshine or in cloudy weather But never again through furze and heather Shall I there wander at wy will. Uncomforted by bird or flower- A green grave lies in Tallaght town. NORA TYNAN O'MAHONY. TH A CRAZY QUILT HE following pages came to me with the above title, and this motto from the biography of Walter Pater: "He never made a crazy quilt of his notes." I had no idea of what was meant by a crazy quilt; and, as my ignorance would be shared (I thought) by many of my readers, I asked the writer for an explanation. She answered: "A crazy quilt is an American invention, a kind of patchwork. The patchwork quilts of our grandmothers were made of regularly shaped pieces of silk or calico, sewn together at the edges and covering an unbroken surface. A crazy quilt has a foundation of crash or serge, and the pieces of coloured silk or calico are laid on it anyhow and fastened down with feather stitch or herring boning at the edges, the foundation stuff being allowed to show in some places. The craziness of the quilt consists in the oddity of the arrangement of colours and shapes. Of course there must be an underlying harmony tempering the craziness." The male reader will hardly find this explanation sufficiently lucid. I. M. R. We sometimes hear and read a good deal of criticism of the manner in which we Irish speak the English language, and some of us make desperate and usually futile efforts, to acquire the idiom and intonation of its original owners. In fact I have heard educated Irishmen maintain that as long as we are compelled by circumstances to speak a foreign language we should endeavour to speak it as correctly as possible. As logically, yes; but with a difference of idiom. Let us make it our servant, not our master, imposing our own mental characteristics upon it, and resisting, as far as possible," the powerful reflex influence of language on mental action," which is, according to Professor Whitney, a universally admitted fact in linguistics." The minds which evolved the Irish language, with its subtle distinctions and scientific system of phonetics, were far keener and more logical than English ones, and the inheritors of these minds are continually striving to adapt the coarser instrument |