countries wealth and rank are generally united; the presence of the latter implies the existence of the former, and the reverence which is offered to the one is supported by the other. The power of money is equally felt every where; it is more acknowledged here. The regard for it is less concealed, and creeps more into our daily speech."

"Yes," replied Seward, "we instinctively take worth, as Cleopatra took a speech of Anthony, in a 'dolorous sense.' That old fellow we were speaking of, is quite a poet the muses, I suppose, alighted upon him by mistake for Mount Helicon. The sight of a person like him must first have suggested the application of the name of Microcosm' to man. He is a bachelor, and wisely remains so; for though Bentham treats of marriage as anœconomical' relation, he more justly esteems it an expensive one."

"Who is that that just nodded to you?"

"His name is Somers; he is a perfidious parasite, poor and a parvenu; but one whose constant sprightliness makes him always agreeable. Though every body's very obedient servant, his language is generally that of a superior, and his bearing singularly independent; for he has sense enough to know that in order to have his voluntary servitude accepted, he must proffer it with the condescension of a master. We court the subjection of an assuming man of fashion because we please ourselves by thinking that we command the ruler of others. The acceptance of a favour is always accompanied by a slight sense of inferiority in the accipient, and we love not to be obliged by one whose crouching we contemn. To rule securely we must in reality serve; to serve profitably we must in appearance rule.” "What is his profession ?"

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He entered an attorney's office, some years ago, but never seriously obeyed the Law's serious call.' The few clients he had, he lost by idleness; for a lawyer's fee is always a fee conditional. At the most flourishing period, I imagine he could not be considered as more than a monoptote in his profession. His carelessness, I suspect, compels him to the profession of a crane

iologist-one conversant with the habits of the longbilled species. He lives, as they say, by his wits; but how long that means of subsistence will continue I know not, for to come to one's money's end soon brings one to one's wit's end. He is clean gone for ever;' for the continued habit of doing wrong has in him eaten out those habits of doing right which the soul brings from heaven, and he has utterly lost his self-respect. Take warning my son, and fall not into dangerous ways. Commit crimes occasionally if you like, but avoid the practice of small evils. We talk of acquiring a habit; we should rather say, being acquired by it. Habit is the janisary power in man; passion and principle the antagonist revolutionary powers for evil and for good. How often the latter will prevail may be judged from there being but one Mahmoud in history, and one Henry the Fourth in fiction."

"Thank you for your counsel. Who is that distrait, but manifestly affected youth by the wall?" said I.

"A young man of moderate talents but morbid egotism; who, having read that Byron, and Shelley, and Gray, and a hundred more were silent and distant in company, cherishes the same awkwardness with all the enthusiasm of sympathetic talent. Vitium, Gaure, Catonis habes. Half the vices and most of the absurdities of young men arise from their not discovering that they are not men of genius."

"Men who live alone among their books," said I, "can scarcely ever take the just measure of their own minds. But a little conversation with business or society soon clears the judgment, and the running stream shakes off the mantling self-conceit that has creamed in repose."

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Yes, for that kind of morbidness, as for private injuries, the remedy is by action. There is a person before you, of whom it were an even wager at any given moment, whether he be in the theatre or the churchwhether he be fighting cocks or presiding at a prayerbook society. He is a professional roué, and an amateur Christian. For Christianity like the rest of the fine arts, has its professors, its critics, and its amateurs;

the Catholic church containing the most professors, the Presbyterian the most critics, and the Episcopal the most amateurs."

"He belongs, I suppose," said I, "to that extended class of persons who are churchmen without being believers."

"Just so; and the demagogue bishop of

in the same company."

"Is he not sincere ?"

"As Wordsworth says,

He is sincere

As vanity and fondness for applause,

And new and shapeless wishes will allow.

stands

The best defence of him that his best friend could make, would be that, in his ardent fancy he has so completely identified himself with his cause, that what the world deems selfishness he persuades himself is devotion. I can pardon all but his writings; for though he plumes himself upon them, and seems resolved, like St. Paul, to show his faith by his works, his literary pretensions are beneath contempt. His mind is a small one, and seems to have been fed from youth on the literature of newspapers and souvenirs. The trash of quotations with which his brain is crammed and his writings are larded, render applicable to him the epithet of Shirley about Prynne voluminously ignorant;' yet when you pass on to the original part, you cannot help exclaiming, 'would God it were all quotation.' His harp, too, hangs by the waters of Babble-on; and that is the saddest part of all, for ‘a fool in verse is twice a fool in prose." "

"I am afraid, my dear Seward, from your manner of treating the pious, that you are 'little better than one of the wicked.' I should be afraid to go to church with you, lest, like Robert Morris, you should alarm the congregation by knocking at the door."

They tell a good story of Sheridan in that matter," replied Seward. "The witty statesman and dramatist was once prevailed on to go to church with his wife, or perhaps entered the sanctuary to avoid a creditor.

It was the first time in his life he had ever been there, and he was profoundly ignorant of the etiquette of the place. The only public assemblies with which he was acquainted were the House of Commons, and the Theatre; and reasoning from the analogy of the most respectable, as soon as the clergyman began, ‘Let all the earth keep silence,' Sherry roared out with vehement good will, "Hear! hear! hear! hear him! hear him! hear him! The astonished visages of the congregation soon convinced him that he was wrong, and drawing on his other source of experience, as soon as the exhortation was finished he began to clap lustily, and pound with the end of his cane. Finding that this blunder was worse than the last, he roared to the Sexton, here, box-keeper, let me out of this box ;' and made his way home from his first, last, and only visit to the steeple-house."

"To recall you to your Asmodean occupation, pray who are those two persons conversing near the window ?"

"They are two brothers, and of the most opposite characters possible. It is marvellous how two persons coming from the same source and going through the same scenes, should be so different. One has grown sillier and pleasanter every year; the other, shrewder and severer every day. The head of the one and the heart of the other have met the bustle of the world as an ice and an egg meet the fire; the one becoming softer and the other harder. The latter of them, though otherwise much a gentleman, is a great dealer in proverbs and rightly, for the unwritten wisdom of the world is greater than that which has been penned. There is a person near them whose history proves how politically and socially as well as morally true is the sentiment that one man plants and another reaps the harvest. He is a merchant, once of great wealth, who ruined himself by undertaking great schemes which others of less ability are now prosecuting with boundless profit. It is always so: the first founder of a great scheme of wealth, though he may begin as rich as the cream I am eating, will infallibly terminate, like the end

of most of the towns of India, poor. When he retires to starve on a crust,

Then in the vulgar yelling press,

And gorge, the fruits of his success."

"There is Scribbleton, the tourist, I see,” said I. "He has done,' France and Austria, and I presume will soon despatch America."

"I met him once," said Seward, "on a steamboat in the west, and happening to have a copy of Xenophon's Memorabilia under my arm, I complimented myself on the similarity of literary taste which our choice of the same author for a travelling companion exhibited. 'How so?' said he, with a puzzled air. Why,' said I, I travel with the Reminiscences of Socrates, and you with the Expedition of Cyrus.' What I most admire in Scribbleton is his sacred regard for truth; he esteems it far too highly to allow a grain of it to be thrown away upon a volume of travels. There was some difficulty lately about securing the right of publishing some of his tours, and I advised his publisher, if he could not get a copy-right for them as books, to take out a patent for them as inventions. Those professional tourists who come forth one after another and gather up and tell the ten-times-repeated nothing about the country, put me in mind of a sort of bird called the alcedo, which frequents the channel of the Bosphorus. For the flight of these birds no motive is known; they seem to be impelled by a restless instinct to keep perpetually moving up and down the narrow strait; when they arrive at one sea, they wheel round and return to the other. The French call them 'les âmes damnées,' because they never have rest. Their flight is as still as death, and no one ever heard the sound of their wings. These tourists are as restless, as senseless, and as dull: would God they were as silent."

"It is these fellows, I imagine," said I, "who keep up the irritated feeling which has so long existed between England and America; they sow contempt, and they reap hatred."