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Some men and some books are difficult of apprehension, dull, dogmatical, and treat of subjects that are not congenial with your mind; and some books and some men are too ready to bestow all their tediousness upon your honour. It is surely, then, the summit of happiness to select our companions, both dead and alive, which best suit our understandings and our dispositions.

Characters of Humour.

From that reserve and restraint, which the rules of female education generally impose, it happens that we seldom see in life, or on the stage, the character of a female humorist. The neglect or contempt of decorum and the etiquettes of society, that the self-indulgence of a humorist implies, would disgust in a woman; and no doubt a female Falstaff would attract no admirers, either in real or fictitious representation.

Style of Composition.

The style of modern writers seems too much inclined to bombast and verbosity, and predominates over the matter. Materiam superat opus. A good style is aptly compared to a good sound stomach, which you enjoy without having your attention attracted by its sensations; whilst an unsound one is always drawing you from the

business you are engaged in by its weakness and flatulence.

M. Boileau.

In the Boleana it is recorded, that this elegant and learned critic used to repeat, with many expressions of approbation, the following lines of a love-sick maiden:

La charmante Bergere,
Ecoutant les discours
D'une méuagere,

Alloit filant toujours;
Et doucement atteinte
D'une si tendre plainte,
Fit tomber, par trois fois,
Le fuseau de ses doigts.

N.B. The praises of this accurate scholar and critic, no doubt, arose from the simplicity and natural turn of these lines, so unlike the general puerilities of French erotic poetry. The thought is taken from a short fragment of Sappho on the same subject, and addressed to her mother, complaining of the difficulty of continuing her task of spinning, from the ardour of the passion which then consumed her.

Bon-Mot of a Fortune-Hunter.

One of these minions of Cupid, being in a ball-room at Bath, heard a gentleman giving an account of the death of a rich and old widow

thus-"Died yesterday, in her 89th year," said the narrator. What a pity!' exclaimed the fortune-hunter; what a fine match she would have made two days ago!'

Jealousy.

This passion is twofold, mental and corporeal. The husband who does not suspect his wife of any criminal act with another man, may yet be jealous of his friend's superior powers of pleasing in manners and conversation, and of the diminution of her attentions to him; and examples are not unfrequent, where children are the objects of jealousy, for the same reason, between the parties.

Pronunciation.

It is wonderful how different the same discourse. appears, pronounced by a good and a bad reader. When Eschines, after his retreat to Rhodes, was one day reading aloud to some friends his rival's famous speech, and the hearers were lost in wonder at the eloquence of Demosthenes; "What," said he, "would you have thought, if you had heard him pronounce it." Martial, in an epigram, has well illustrated this subject

"Those verses that you read, my friend, are mine;
But as you read them, they may pass for thine."

Singular Opinion of Philosophy.

Boswell relates an anecdote of an old schoolfellow of Dr. Johnson, who said to him, "You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson: I have tried too in my life to be a philosopher; but I do not know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in." This was an opinion natural enough in a dull man, as Johnson's friend is represented to have been; and the error on this important subject is forcibly corrected by our great, and learned, and philo. sophical Poet-

How charming is divine philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweet,

Where no crude surfeit reigns.

Milton's Comus.

Men of Phlegm.

These "cool observers" of life have great negative advantages over persons of more lively imaginations and more ardent passions. The former have very little need of much reason to direct and govern their actions: they seem to possess great patience, and even fortitude, amidst the evils, and against the temptations, of life, but it is mere appearance; and Swift, with his usual acute and

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sarcastic description of characters, has strongly sketched that of a phlegmatic man,—

Indifference in wisdom's guise
All fortitude of mind supplies.

Harington, author of the Oceana.

It has been often observed, that the best writers of history are liable to ascribe events to causes either inadequate to their consequences, or altogether irrelative to their probable issues. The following observations of a writer much conversant with political subjects are worthy of our most serious consideration. Speaking of the convulsions of the state in the time of Charles I., Sir James Harington remarks, "The troubles of the times are not to be attributed wholly to willfulness or faction; neither to the misgovernment of the prince, nor to the stubbornness of the people; but to a change in the balance of property; which, since Henry the Seventh's time, has fallen into the scale of the Commons, from that of the King and Lords."-Harington's Oceana.

Odes.

This mode of composition, so difficult to be well executed, and which seems the " pons asininus" of moderate poets, and the foolish wonder of " gentle readers," has had admirers from Cowley to Mason.

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