richer, or greater, or more learned. The mask soon becomes an instrument of torture. Fit objects to employ the intervals of life are among the greatest aids to contentment that a man can possess. The lives of many persons are an alternation of the one engrossing pursuit, and a sort of listless apathy. They are either grinding or doing nothing. Now, to those who are half their lives fiercely busy, the remaining half is often torpid without quiescence. A man should have some pursuits which may be always in his own power, and to which he may turn gladly in his hours of recreation. And if the intellect requires thus to be provided with perpetual objects, what must it be with the affections? Depend upon it, the most fatal idleness is that of the heart. And the man who feels weary of life may be sure that he does not love his fellow-creatures as he ought.

You cannot hope for anything like contentment so long as you continue to attach that ridiculous degree of importance to the events of this life, which so many people are inclined to do. Observe the effect which it has upon them; they are most uncomfortable if their little projects do not turn out according to their fancy-nothing is to be angular to them; they regard external things as the only realities; and as they have fixed their abode here, they must have it arranged to their mind. In all they undertake, they feel the anxiety of a gambler, and not the calmness of a labouring man. It is, however, the success or failure of their efforts, and not the motives for their endeavour, which gives them this concern. "It will be all the same a hundred years hence." So says the Epicurean as he saunters by. The Christian exhorts them to extend their hopes and their fears to the far future. But they are up to the lips in the present, though they taste it none the more for that. And so they go on, fretting, and planning, and contending; until an event, about which of all their anxieties they have felt the least anxious, sweeps them and their cobwebs away from the face of the earth.

I have no intention of putting forward specifics for real afflictions, or pretending to teach refined methods for avoiding grief. As long, however, as there is anything to be done in a matter, the time for grieving about it has not yet come. But when the subject for grief is fixed and inevitable, sorrow is to be borne like pain. It is only a paroxysm of either that can

study of Bacon, and perhaps Colton, though he is less epigrammatic than this latter writer. Ruskin speaks of his obligations, as regards his own style, to the "quiet English of Helps."

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justify us in neglecting the duties which no bereavement can lessen, and which no sorrow can leave us without. And we may remember that sorrow is at once the lot, the trial, and the privilege of man.

CHARLES DICKENS.'

1. MRS. GAMP'S APARTMENT.

(FROM "MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT," PUBLISHED IN 1843.)

MRS. GAMP's apartment in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, wore, metaphorically speaking, a robe of state. It was swept and garnished for the reception of a visitor. That visitor was Betsy Prig; Mrs. Prig of Bartlemy's; or, as some said, Barklemy's; or, as some said, Bardlemy's; for by all these endearing and familiar appellations had the hospital of Saint Bartholomew become a household word among the sisterhood which Betsy Prig adorned.

Mrs. Gamp's apartment was not a spacious one, but, to a contented mind, a closet is a palace; and the first-floor front at Mr. Sweedlepipe's may have been, in the imagination of Mrs. Gamp, a stately pile. If it were not exactly that to restless intellects, it at least comprised as much accommodation as any person not sanguine to insanity could have looked for in a room of its dimensions. For only keep the bedstead always in your mind, and you were safe. That was the grand secret. Remembering the bedstead, you might even stoop to look under the little round table for anything you had dropped, without hurting yourself much against the chest of drawers, or qualifying as a patient for Saint Bartholomew by falling into the fire. Visitors were much assisted in their cautious efforts to preserve an unflagging recollection of this piece of furniture by its size, which was great. It was not a turn-up bedstead, nor yet a French bedstead, not yet a four-post bedstead, but what is poetically called a tent; the sacking whereof was low and bulgy, insomuch that Mrs. Gamp's box would not go under it,

(1) Opinions are much divided on the question of Dickens's qualifications as a writer; but all allow that they are distinguished. The two extracts above show the humorous manner in which he can treat a domestic interior on the one hand, and a great phenomenon of nature on the other. Each is excellent in its way; but neither beyond cavil, or even justifiable criticism, in regard to style.

but stopped half way, in a manner which, while it did violence to the reason, likewise endangered the legs of a stranger. The frame, too, which would have supported the canopy and hangings, if there had been any, was ornamented with divers pippins carved in timber, which on the slightest provocation, and frequently on none at all, came tumbling down, harassing the peaceful guest with inexplicable terrors. The bed itself was decorated with a patchwork quilt of great antiquity; and at the upper end, upon the side nearest to the door, hung a scanty curtain of blue check, which prevented the zephyrs that were abroad in Kingsgate Street from visiting Mrs. Gamp's head too roughly.

The chairs in Mrs. Gamp's apartment were extremely large and broad-backed, which was more than a sufficient reason for there being but two in number. They were both elbow-chairs of ancient mahogany; and were chiefly valuable for the slippery nature of their seats, which had been originally horsehair, but were now covered with a shiny substance of a bluish tint, from which the visitor began to slide away with a dismayed countenance immediately after sitting down. What Mrs. Gamp wanted in chairs, she made up in bandboxes; of which she had a great collection, devoted to the reception of various miscellaneous valuables, which were not, however, as well protected as the good woman, by a pleasant fiction, seemed to think; for, though every bandbox had a carefully closed lid, not one among them had a bottom; owing to which cause the property within was merely, as it were, extinguished. The chest of drawers having been originally made to stand upon the top of another chest, had a dwarfish, elfin look alone; but, in regard of security, it had a great advantage over the bandboxes, for as all the handles had been long ago pulled off, it was very difficult to get at its contents. This, indeed, was only to be done by one of two devices; either by tilting the whole structure forward until all the drawers fell out together, or by opening them singly with knives, like oysters.

2. A WILD NIGHT AT SEA.'

A DARK and dreary night; people nestling in their beds or circling late about the fire; Want, colder than Charity, shiver

(1) It may be observed that when the mind is under emotion, the body often spontaneously, as it were, assumes a sort of oscillating movement, strictly measured or rhythmical-and that if the mind, under these circumstances, displays its feelings in words, those words generally tend to become measured or rhythmical

ing at the street corners; church towers humming with the faint vibration of their own tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment "One!" The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail. Whither go the clouds and winds so eagerly? If like guilty spirits they repair to some dread conference with powers like themselves, in what wild region do the elements hold council, or where unbend in terrible disport? Here! Free from that cramped prison called the earth, and out upon the waste of waters;—here, roaring, raging, shrieking, howling all night long. Hither come the sounding voices from the caverns on the coast of that small island, sleeping a thousand miles away so quietly in the midst of angry waves; and hither, to meet them, rush the blasts from unknown desert places of the world. Here in the fury of their unchecked liberty, they storm and buffet with each other, until the sea, lashed into passion like their own, leaps up in ravings mightier than theirs, and the whole scene is whirling madness. On, on, on, over the countless miles of angry space roll the long heaving billows. Mountains and caves are here, and yet are not; for what is now the one, is now the other; then all is but a boiling heap of rushing water. Pursuit, and flight, and mad return of wave on wave, and savage struggling, ending in a spouting up of foam that whitens the black night; incessant change of place, and form, and hue; constancy in nothing but eternal strife: on, on, on they roll, and darker grows the night, and louder howl the winds, and more clamorous and fierce become the million voices in the sea, when the wild cry goes forth upon the storm, A

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too. In reading the above passage, it will be noticed that in some parts, apparently without any intention of the writer, the words become metrically arranged, and with very little trouble might be read as unrhymed verse. For example

"On, on, on they roll,

And darker grows the night,

And louder howl the winds,

More clamorous and more fierce become

The million voices in the sea,

When the wild cry goes forth upon the storm," &c.

The pursuit of this subject would lead to an inquiry into the connection between rhythm and poetry; but the space does not allow of carrying it further.

ship!" Onward she comes, in gallant combat with the elements, her tall masts trembling, and her timbers starting on the strain; onward she comes, now high upon the curling billows, now low down in the hollows of the sea, as hiding for the moment from its fury; and every storm-voice in the air and water cries more loudly yet, "A ship!" Still she comes striving on and at her boldness and the spreading cry, the angry waves rise up above each other's hoary heads to look; and round about the vessel, far as the mariners on her decks can pierce into the gloom, they press upon her, forcing each other down, and starting up and rushing forward from afar, in dreadful curiosity. High over her they break; and round her surge and roar, and giving place to others, moaningly depart, and dash themselves to fragments in their baffled anger: still she comes onward bravely. And though the eager multitude crowd thick and fast upon her all the night, and dawn of day discovers the untiring train yet bearing down upon the ship in an eternity of troubled water, onward she comes, with dim lights burning in her hull, and people there asleep: as if no deadly element were peering in at every seam and chink, and no drowned seamen's grave, with but a plank to cover it, were yawning in the unfathomable depths below.

THOMAS CARLYLE.'

1. THE ENGLISH NATION.

(FROM "PAST AND PRESENT," PUBLISHED IN 1843.)

Of all the nations in the world at present, the English are the stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a "dumb" nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken, in spite of the Shakespeares and Miltons who show us what possibilities there are! O, Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face of

(1) Carlyle's works display, at least, two manners of writing; running a close parallel with Turner's two manners of painting. The former was correct, finished, elegant, flowing; the latter eccentric, peculiar, dashing, fitful-foaming, like a cataract when it falls-serene, like the same water resting in its glassy pool. Whatever it wants-enormous power, the grasp of a master's hand, the power to urge on, the power to hold in, his subject, is everywhere felt. We may not be at all times gratified with his style; but we must accept it as we do a rough Alpine path, for the sake of the invigorating exercise it furnishes for our muscles, and the elevating scenery with which it brings us into intimate and delightful acquaintance.