.

ou de plantes, et même de poissons et de plantes, qui ne sont point du pays; Médailles incontestables du Déluge." I met with an early trace of the metaphor in a letter from Henry Baker, the naturalist, to Dr. Doddridge: "And as ancient coins and medals struck by mighty princes, in remembrance of their exploits, are highly valued as evidences of such facts, no less ought these fossil marine bodies to be considered as medals of the Almighty, fully proving the desolation he has formerly brought upon the earth."

But, with all his graces, Fontenelle was a French

man.

He often flutters into epigram; and, with the ingenuity of our own Cowley, shares his sparkling conceits and inverted fancies; and, like him, he softened the most rugged tempers. He won the kind looks of Warburton, who admired his prose comedies, which the author intended for a posthumous appearance. But, as he pleasantly observes, his length of life-he almost completed a century-having quite exhausted his patience, he determined to wait no longer, and relieved his executors of the publication by undertaking it himself.

JUNE THE THIRD.

TANDING under this lime-tree, every bough utters its own sermon.

The sha

dowy motion on the grass preaches. In the world nothing is still. The earth moves; small things and great obey the law; and this chequered turf, to which I am giving a fainter green with the pressure of my feet, goes round the sun as swiftly as the vast forests of America.

The elements are always changing. So is society. A merchant, his speculations hardened into gold, swells up a lord; or blown into air, disappears in smoke. Nothing but the Christian mind is unaffected by this circular motion and variableness. I recollect an illustration in a black folio of the seventeenth century, rich as usual in conceits, controversy, grandeur, and Greek: as a watch, though tossed up and down by the agitation of him who carries it, does not, on that account, undergo any perturbation or disorder in the working of the spring and wheels within, so the true Christian heart, however shaken by the joltings it meets with in the pressure and tumult of the world, suffers no derangement in the adjustment and action of its machinery. The hand still points to eternity.

JUNE THE FIFTH.

HERE is one passage in Langhorne so immeasurably superior to any other in his

works, that the reader is disposed to transfer to him Gray's doubt, whether "Nugent wrote his own ode." It occurs in the Country Justice, at the close of an appeal on behalf of unfortunate vagrants:

"Perhaps on some inhospitable shore,

The houseless wretch a widow'd parent bore,
Who then, no more by golden prospects led,
Of the poor Indian begg'd a leafy bed.
Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain;
Rent o'er her babe, her eye dissolv'd in dew;
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery baptized in tears."

The last line is one of the most pathetic in poetry. In the Jesuit Bonhour's collection of Thoughts from the Fathers, I found the following apostrophe of St. Leon: "Heureux vos larmes, saint Apostre, qui, pour effacer le péché que vous commistes en renonceant votre Maître, eurent la vertu d'un sacre baptisme." Donne (Serm. cxxxi.) has the same image: "The tears themselves shall be the sign;

the tears shall be ambassadours of joy; a present gladness shall consecrate your sorrow, and tears shall baptize and give a new name to your passion." The coincidence deserves notice.

A pleasant and well-known anecdote is connected with these verses. On one occasion Walter Scott, a lad of fifteen, was in the company of Burns, at Edinburgh. There happened to be in the room a print by Bunbury, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting on one side, and his widow, with a child in her arms, on the other. The lines of Langhorne were written beneath. Burns shed tears at the print, and inquired after the author of the inscription. Scott was the only person who knew his name; he whispered it to a friend, who told it to Burns; and he rewarded the future minstrel of Scotland "with a look and a word," which in days of glory and fame were remembered with pride.

The name of Langhorne was faintly revived by the publication of Hannah More's Memoirs; but he is chiefly known in connection with those mightier spirits, to whose youthful ears his musical rhymes were pleasing. His flute had two or three harmonious notes; and he was one of the earliest embellishers of "the short and simple annals of the poor."

JUNE THE SEVENTH.

LANCED at the new letters of Horace
Walpole to Lady Ossory, and noticed the

strange likeness to Gray in manner and expression, extending even to phrases and idioms. The affectation of both is very amusing, Walpole being the more manly. "I went the other day," he wrote, "to Scarlet's, to buy green spectacles; he was mighty assiduous to give me a pair that would not tumble my hair. 'Lord, sir,' said I, 'when one is come to wear spectacles, what signifies how one looks!"" Gray underwent great annoyance on this very account. A concealed double eyeglass was the nearest approach to spectacles that his delicacy could endure. I observe, likewise, in the poet a fondness for banter and smartness on serious subjects, which is extremely disagreeable. He probably caught the disease from Walpole, who told Cole that he would not give threepence for Newton's work on the Prophecies.

The literary character of Walpole has been drawn by himself in a few words: "I am a composition of Anthony Wood, and Madame Danoi, the fairytale writer." This is true. He had much of the minute learning, but none of the dust of the anti