Fine fancies in manufactures invent engines rather pretty than useful; and commonly one trade is too narrow for them. They are better to project new ways than to prosecute old, and are rather skilful in many mysteries than thriving in one. They affect not voluminous inventions, wherein many years must constantly be spent to perfect them; except there be in them variety of pleasant employment.

Imagination (the work of the fancy) hath produced real effects. Many serious and sad examples hereof may be produced: I will only insist on a merry one. A gentleman having led a company of children beyond their usual journey, they began to be weary, and jointly cried to him to carry them; which, because of their multitude, he could not do, but told them that he would provide them horses to ride on. Then cutting little wands out of the hedge as nags, for them, and a great stake as a gelding for himself; thus mounted, fancy put mettle into their legs, and they came cheerfully home.

Fancy runs most furiously when a guilty conscience drives it. One that owed much money, and had many creditors, as he walked London streets in the evening, a tenterhook catched his cloak. "At whose suit ?" said he, conceiving some bailiff had arrested him. Thus guilty consciences are afraid where no fear is, and count every creature they meet a serjeant sent from God to punish them.

MISCELLANEOUS.

GRAVITY is the ballast of the soul.

order of the words: but the matter expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The proper method of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would be a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of poetry; or this is not poetry; but this wants sense; it is neither interesting in itself, nor can lead to anything interesting: the images neither originate in that sane state of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the reader. This is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses. Why trouble yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the genus? why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

He shall be immortal who liveth till he be stoned by one without fault.

Is there no way to bring home a wandering sheep but by worrying him to death?

Contentment consisteth not in adding more fuel, but in taking away some fire.

It is the worst clandestine marriage when God is not invited to it.

Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the married state. Look not therein for contentment greater than God will give, or a creature in this world can receive, namely, to be free from all inconveniences. Marriage is not like the hill Olympus, wholly clear, without clouds. Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs, as if their mirth were turned into care for their young ones.

Neither choose all, nor not at all for beauty. They tell us of a floating island in Scotland; but sure no wise pilot will cast anchor there.

Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl-chain of all virtues.

SECTION VIII.

SIR THOMAS BROWN.

"I WONDER and admire his entireness in every subject that is before him. He follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be the subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk, how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh-bone, now a skull, then a bit of a moulded coffin, a fragment of an old tombstone with moss in its "Hic jacet," a ghost or a winding sheet, or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind; and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or a gilt Anno Domini,' from a perished coffin top ”—C. L.

THE PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC.

THERE is between us one common name and appellation, one faith and necessary body of principles common to us both; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them or for them; I could never perceive any rational consequence from those many texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pollute themselves with the temples of the Heathens, we being all Christians and not divided by such detested impieties as might profane our prayers or the place wherein we make them, or that a resolved conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere, especially in places devoted to his service: where, if their devotions offend him, mine may please him; if theirs profane it, mine may hallow it; holy water and crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgment nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeal terms superstition; my common conversation I do acknowledge austere; my behavior full of rigor, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions,

which may express or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my own arm rather than a church, nor willingly deface the memory of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition of friars; for though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion. I could never hear the Ave Maria bell without an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all, that is, in silence and dumb contempt; whilst therefore they direct their devotions to her, I offer mine to God, and rectify the errors of their prayers by rightly ordering mine own.

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion; or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps, within a few days, I should dissent myself.

It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs of the Bishop of Rome, to whom as a temporal prince, we owe the duty of good language; I confess there is cause of passion between us; by his sentence I stand excommunicated, heretic is the best language he affords me, yet can no ear witness I ever returned to him the name of antichrist, man of sin, or whore of Babylon; it is the method of charity to suffer without reaction: those usual satires, and invectives of the pulpit may perchance produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose ears are opener to rhetoric than logic, yet do they in no wise confirm the faith of wiser believers, who know that a good cause needs not to be patroned by passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute.

THE STUDENT.

THE world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beast; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before

the sixth day when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works; those highly magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.*

DEFORMITY.

I HOLD there is general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind or species of creature whatsoever; I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express those actions of their inward forms. And having past that general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and beauty; there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein, notwithstanding, there is a kind of beauty, nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or misshapen, but the chaos; wherein notwithstanding, to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet impregnant by the voice of God.†

* Man is placed on this stage of the world, to view the several natures and actions of the creatures not idly as they view us.

"The things," says Boyle, "for which I hold life valuable are the satisfaction that accrues from the improvement of knowledge and the exercise of piety."

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† An Emperor of Germany coming by chance, on a Sunday, into a church, found there a most misshapen priest pene portentum naturæ," insomuch as the Emperor scorned and contemned him. But when he heard him read those words in the service, "For it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves," the Emperor checked his own proud thoughts, and made inquiry into the quality and condition of the man: and finding him, on examination, most learned and devout, he made him Archbishop of Colen, which place he did excellently discharge.-FULLER's Holy State.

In Love's Labor's Lost, there is the following dialogue between Rosalind and Biron: