Although Haller surpassed his contemporaries in anatomy, and published several important anatomical works, he was troubled at the outset with a horror of dissection beyond what is usual with the inexperienced, and it was only, it is stated, by firm discipline that he became an anatomist at all.

"Habit, in the great majority of things," says the grave and reverend John Foster, "is a greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt; in religious character, it is a grand felicity. The devout man exults in the indications of his being fixed and irretrievable. He feels this confirmed habit as the grasp of the hand of God, which will never let him go. From this advanced state he looks with firmness and joy on futurity, and says, I carry the eternal mark upon me that I belong to God; I am free of the universe; and I am ready to go to any world to which He shall please to transmit me, certain that everywhere, in height or depth, He will acknowledge me forever."

XI.

THE HABIT OF DETRACTION.

"YES; but These two little words, in this close connection-divided only by a semicolon-represent, in essence, it must be admitted, a very large part of all the conversation of all mankind. We assent, with qualification; and the qualification, unhappily, too often ends the discussion. The shadows finish the picture. The habit we all deplore, and nearly all possess. Disparagement, detraction, call it what you may, that we are quick to condemn in others, we are very slow to correct in ourselves. We see it, we talk about it, we despise it, we blush at it, albeit we persist in it. The mischief goes for nothing, in effect, and we seem to look upon it as a part of life, inevitable and indispensable, to be condemned or indulged, as it disagrees or accords with our feelings or interests. Nature. - human nature in this instance goes her own way, and man is not to be made over in haste; therefore, as a study, merely, this article is intended, without the slightest conception of reforming violently any human being. The Tigris flows through Bagdad when the caliphs are all dead.

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'God," says Heine, "has given us tongues, that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and bitter truths of our enemies." "I have," he says, "the most peaceable disposition. My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof but a good bed, good fare, fresh milk and butter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, he would grant me the pleasure of seeing

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some six or seven of my enemies hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would, before their death, forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we ought to forgive our enemies - but not until they are hanged." "As far as I can understand the 'loving our enemies,"" said Poe, "it implies the hating our friends." When Marshal Narvaez was on his death-bed, his confessor asked him if he freely forgave all his enemies. "I have no enemies," replied the dying marshal, proudly. Every one must have made enemies in the course of his life," suggested the priest, mildly. "Oh, of course," replied the marshal; "I have had a great number of enemies in my time, but I have none now. I have had them all shot!" You recollect the surgeon, to whom Voltaire was once compared, who not only attended a friend carefully during a last illness, but dissected him. You remember also the New Zealander who was asked whether he loved a missionary who had been laboring for his soul and those of his countrymen. "To be sure I loved him. Why, I ate a piece of him for my breakfast this morning!"

"If we quarreled," says Thackeray, "with all the people who abuse us behind our backs, and began to tear their eyes out as soon as we set ours on them, what a life it would be, and when should we have any quiet? Backbiting is all fair in society. Abuse me, and I will abuse you; but let us be friends when we meet. Have we not all entered a dozen rooms, and been sure, from the countenances of the amiable persons present, that they had been discussing our little peculiarities, perhaps as we were on the stairs? Was our visit, therefore, the less agreeable? Did we quarrel and say hard words to one another's faces? No we wait until some of our dear friends take their leave, and then comes our turn. My back is at my neighbor's service; as soon as that is turned let him make what faces he thinks proper: but

when we meet we grin and shake hands like well-bred folk, to whom clean linen is not more necessary than a clean, sweet-looking countenance, and a nicely gotten up smile for company."

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate with civility." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume our hostility when we return."

The delightful deference which society obliges us to pay to those who hate us, is very much like returning thanks for injuries a refinement in tyranny frequently practiced by the worst of the Roman emperors. Seneca informs us that Caligula was thanked by those whose children had been put to death, and whose property had been confiscated. A person who had grown old in his attendance on kings, was asked how he had attained a thing so uncommon in courts as old age? It was, replied he, by receiving injuries and returning thanks. It was on the same principle, we suppose, that Louis Philippe, unlike the great Napoleon, saw all the malicious caricatures that were made of himself, and laughed at them lustily. The young Prince Imperial, alluding to the visit of Count Bismarck to Napoleon III. at Plombiêres, said, "They let me laugh as much as I like; but what I don't like is to be obliged to smile and look pleasant to men who I know are my father's enemies."

We are all sore, deficient, and vulnerable; and by criticism, ridicule, and detraction, we supply ourselves with emollients, compensations, and weapons. Man, too, being a laughing animal, soon finds that the most laughable

object in creation is himself. He is continually blundering and stumbling, and he only learns to keep his feet by falling. Morally as well as physically. If an invisible knocking machine tapped each one of us on the head the instant and every time we thought evil or did wrong, what a getting up there would be! What a scene the street would present! To the church or to the market, the same. Verily, the world laughs ;- with us, and then at us.

Johnson uttered a conspicuously generous thing of his friend Sir Joshua, when he said, “Reynolds, sir, is the most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom, if you should quarrel, you would find the most difficulty how to abuse." "In faults," said Goethe, "men are much alike; in good qualities they differ." We readily perceive the faults of others by being so familiar with our own. Their virtues are not so visible to us, for the reason that our own are not so distinct to ourselves. The real good that is in us is unconscious, almost occult, and blushes when it is discovered.

It is only the very few, we hope, who, by what Hawthorne calls the "alchemy of quiet malice," concoct a subtle poison from the ordinary experiences of life. For the fun of the thing, more than for the mischief of it, the world prattles on. Sometimes it is cruel; but it is the cruelty of the thoughtless boy. It does not much concern itself about justice or injustice. To the sources it does not much care to go if it could. It prefers to see with its eyes rather than with its head, by its senses rather than by its reason. It sees outwardly, and talks for recreation-irresponsibly, generally, and without reflection. "As for good sense," said Gil Blas, "if an angel from heaven were to whisper wisdom in one ear, and your cousin her mortal chit-chat in the other, I am afraid the angel might whistle for an audience."

Boswell was thought by some of his contemporaries