pleading so earnestly to let you men have one evening's billiards in the week that we have all consented. And we are all coming to look on-just to prevent gambling and the use of wicked language, you know. know. And we propose to have it on Saturday evening, so that you won't be tempted to play after twelve." "Indeed! Have you provided hobbyhorses for us, madam? Would it please you to have clean blouses and pinafores sent up to the billiard-room, that we may not chalk our clothes? Shall we be rewarded with a silver threepenny-piece if we sing a hymn prettily? Gadzooks, madam! are we babes and sucklings, to be treated in this manner?" "You needn't swear," says the small person, calmly, "especially on such a night as this. Shall we go up to Mickleham Downs?" An aërolite star fell athwart the sky, and for a moment left a line of light in its wake. Looking at that, and at the wonderful expanse all throbbing with stars, we somehow forgot the fierce fight that had recently raged in our small social circle. We walked on through the white and silent world with that other and living world looking down on it with a million sad and distant eyes; and after the storm there was peace. WILLIAM BLACK. HEROISM AND HUMANITY OF SIR RICHARD HERBERT. FROM "THE LIFE OF GEORGE HERBERT." IR RICHARD HERBERT of Colebrook was a very brave man in battle, the chief employment of those days. It is said of Sir Richard that he "twice passed through a great army of northern men alone with his pole- or battle-axe in his hand, and returned without any mortal hurt." Another story illustrates the good knight's honorable regard for his promise. He was employed by King Edward IV. to besiege Harlech Castle, in Merionethshire, in Wales. The castle was held by a brave captain who had served for many years in France. It was his boast that he "had kept a castle in France so long that he made the old women in Wales talk of him, and that he would keep the castle so long that he would make the old women in France talk of him." He made good his word by an obstinate defence. The position of the castle was so strong as to render it almost impossible to overcome its inmates except by starvation. To induce a surrender, Sir Richard promised to urge King Edward IV. to spare the captain's life, which had been forfeited by his rebellion. The knight soon after brought his prisoner before the king and represented the circumstances of the surrender. The king replied that he had given no authority to his officer to hold out any hopes of mercy, and that the latter, having used his best exertions to save his foeman's life, had satisfied his pledged word. But Sir Richard would not be tempted from his obligation. "Grant me, I pray," he entreated his sovereign, "one of two things: either place this brave man back in his castle and send some one else to subdue him, or else take my life in place of his whom I have promised to do my utmost to have spared." The king was so impressed by this honorable devotion that he granted the prisoner's life. The There is another example of Sir Richard's be regarded as a blessing, though we are by no means inclined to adopt the opinion of that sage who thought "that the best thing that could have happened to a man was never to have been born, and the next best to have died the moment after he came into existence." The common argument, however, which is made use of to prove the value of life from the strong desire which almost every one feels for its continuance appears to be altogether inconclusive. The wise and the foolish, the weak and the strong, the lame and the blind, the prisoner and the free, the prosperous and the wretched, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, from the little child who tries to leap over his own shadow to the old man who stumbles blindfold on his grave, all feel this desire in common. Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. love and mercy. He had, with his brother, IT GEORGE L. DUYCKINCK. THE LOVE OF LIFE. FROM "THE ROUND TABLE." T is our intention to expose certain vulgar errors which have crept into our reasoning on men and manners. Perhaps one of the most interesting of these is that which relates to the source of our general attachment to life. We are not going to enter into the question whether life is, on the whole, to The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions. We are not attached to it so much for its own. sake or as it is connected with happiness as because it is necessary to action. Without life there can be no action, no objects of pursuit, no restless desires, no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it-that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope. The proof that our attachment to life is not absolutely owing to the immediate satisfaction. we find in it is that those persons are commonly found most loth to part with it who have the least enjoyment of it, and who have the greatest difficulties to struggle with, as losing gamesters are the most desperate. And, further, there are not many persons who, with all their pretended love of life, would not, if it had been in their power, have melted down the longest life to a few hours. "The schoolboy," says Addison, counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married." "Hope and fantastic expectations spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for a coronation or the death of an enemy or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession without any termediate notices, we throw away a precious year" (Jeremy Taylor). We would willingly and without remorse sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object. We chiefly look upon life, then, as the means to an end. Its common enjoyments and its daily evils are alike disregarded for any idle purpose we have in in view. It should seem as if there were a few green sunny spots in the desert of life to which we are always hastening forward; we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not what perils or suffering we endure so that we arrive at them at last. However weary we may be of the same stale round, however sick of the past, however hopeless of the future, the mind still revolts at the thought of death, because the fancied possibility of good, which always remains with life, gathers strength as it is about to be torn from us for ever, and the dullest scene looks bright compared with the darkness of the grave. Our reluctance to part with existence evidently does not depend on the calm and even current of our lives, but on the force and impulse of the passions. Hence that indifference to death which has been sometimes remarked in people who lead a solitary and peaceful life in remote and barren districts. The pulse of life in them does not beat strong enough to occasion any violent revulsion of the frame when it ceases. He who treads the green mountain turf or he who sleeps beneath it enjoys an almost equal quiet. The death of those persons has always been accounted happy who had attained their utmost wishes, who had nothing left to regret or to desire. Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain, to the violence of our efforts and the keenness of our disappointments, and to our earnest desire to find in the future, if possible, rich amends for the past. We may be said to nurse our existence with the greatest tenderness according to the pain it has cost us, and feel at every step of our varying progress the truth of that line of the poet, "An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour." The love of life is, in fact, the sum of all our passions and of all our enjoyments; but these are by no means the same thing, for the vehemence of our passions is irritated not less by disappointment than by the prospect of success. Nothing seems to be a match for this general tenaciousness of existence but such an extremity either of bodily or mental suffering as destroys at once the power both of habit and imagination. In short, the question whether life is accompanied with a greater quantity of pleasure or pain may be fairly set aside as frivolous and of no practical utility, for our attachment to life depends on our interest in it, and it cannot be denied that we have more interest in this moving, busy scene, agitated with a thousand hopes and fears and checkered with every diversity of joy and sorrow, than in a dreary blank. To be something is better than to be nothing, because we can feel no interest in nothing. Passion, imagination, self-will, the sense of power, the very consciousness of our existence, bind us to life and hold us fast in its chains as by a magic spell in spite of every other consideration. Nothing can be more philosophical than the reasoning which Milton puts into the mouth of the fallen angel: "And that must end us, that must be our cure, Nearly the same account may be given in answer to the question which has been asked-why so few tyrants kill themselves. In the first place, they are never satisfied with the mischief they have done and cannot quit their hold of power after all sense of pleasure is fled. Besides, they absurdly argue from the means of happiness placed within their reach to the end itself, and, dazzled by the pomp and pageantry of a throne, cannot relinquish the persuasion that they ought to be happier than other men. The prejudice of opinion, which attaches us to life, is in them stronger than in others and incorrigible to experience. The great are life's fools, dupes of the splendid shadows that surround them and wedded to the very mockeries of opinion. Whatever is our situation or pursuit in life, the result will be much the same. The strength of the passion seldom corresponds to the pleasure we find in its indulgence. The miser "robs himself to increase his store; the ambitious man toils up a slippery precipice only to be tumbled headlong from its height; the lover is infatuated with the charms of his mistress exactly in proportion to the mortifications he has received from her. Even those who succeed in nothing, who, as it has been emphatically expressed, "Are made desperate by too quick a sense From peace, like exiles on some barren rock, are yet as unwilling as others to give over the unprofitable strife: their harassed, feverish existence refuses rest and frets the languor of exhausted hope into the torture of unavailing regret. The exile who has been unexpectedly restored to his country and to liberty often finds his courage fail with the accomplishment of all his wishes, and the struggle of life and hope ceases at the same instant. We once more repeat that we do not in the foregoing remarks mean to enter into a comparative estimate of the value of human life, but merely to show that the strength of our attachment to it is a very fallacious test of its happiness. TH WILLIAM HAZLITT. THE MIDDLE AGES. HERE is an infancy, a growth and a development of the public mind analogous to that of the individual understanding, with this difference-that in nations the progress counts by centuries which in indi- | is obliged to tack on the one side and on the viduals is numbered by years. To judge the past by the present, therefore, is absurd. The benefit of studying history at all consists in the wisdom which may be gleaned from it; and the wisdom can only result from the truth which it furnishes, and the truth can be discovered only by studying it in the proper manner. In fact, there is another great difference between the individual and public mind. The former is trained up by other minds, already ripened, but the latter has no senior tutor. The aggregate mind, in its largest sense, moves forward on the mysterious point dividing two eternities, the past and the future. It has a certain measure of experience, a certain general idea of the ground over which it has travelled, but of its direction or tendency in reference to the future all is at all given times uncertain and unknown. There is a mysterious veil at all times hanging over the future which moves onward in exact keeping with the ad vance of the present, so that men may preserve a vague recollection of what has happened, but no man is able to tell with certainty what is to come. Thus, looking back at the history of civilization, we can now discover that society has made many a curve and many a pause, while those of whom it was composed imagined themselves to be always in motion and always moving on a straight line. We suppose this to be the case in our own regard, but it is quite possible that the five-and-twentieth century, looking back to the nineteenth, will perceive how divergent from the straight line were the leading impulses and directions of our age. In fact, the public mind in its progress is like the course of a vessel at sea. It other, sometimes even to recede, by the force of circumstances over which the pilot can have no control. To judge of its actions at any given time of history, we ought to assimilate our own mind to the condition of the public mind at such a period. We ought to forget, if possible, the experience which has been since then acquired, but, taking our stand at the origin of any historical question, to travel downward with the current of its development, instead of absurdly rowing our shallow boat of criticism against its mighty stream. The first period of the Christian Church was a period in which she knew the State only as the source of her sufferings and her triumphs. Her missionaries had extended themselves throughout the length and breadth of the Roman empire. They had penetrated countries. where the Roman eagles had never been known or heard of. Her converts were numerous in all the provinces, in the capital, in the army, in the Senate, and even in the houses of the Caesars themselves. Still, the frown of the State was upon her, and to escape it she found a hiding-place in the catacombs of Rome. If she met the State at all, it was only at the tribunal of some consul or governor, or on the scaffold to witness the triumph of some glorious member of her body against whom the sword of the State was uplifted for no other crime save that of belief in Jesus of Nazareth. At length Constantine is triumphant over his rivals and his enemy. He embraces the Christian religion, and the cross, which had hitherto been the emblem of all that is vile, is now set in the imperial diadem as the most precious of its ornaments and the |