work, digging this hole. Without delay, he ran to the Governor of the city, and told him, as a secret, that Casem had found a great treasure in his garden. This was quite enough to arouse the Governor's cupidity; and it was all in vain that our miser declared he had not found anything, but had only buried his old slippers. In vain he dug them up again, and brought them forth in presence of the Judge; the Governor had made up his mind to have money, and Casem was obliged to purchase his release with a large sum. 66 In utter despair, he left the Governor's, carrying his expensive slippers in his hand, while in his heart he wished them far away. "Why," said he, "should I thus carry them in my hand to my own disgrace?" So he threw them into an aqueduct not far from the Governor's palace. Now," ," said he, "I shall hear no more of you; you have cost me money enough-away with you from my sight!" But, alas! the slippers stuck fast in the mud of the aqueduct. This was enough; in a few hours the stream was stopped, the water overflowed; the watermen ran together, for the Governor's cellars were inundated, and for all this trouble and misfortune Casem's slippers were answerable! The watermen soon discovered the unlucky cause of the mischief, and as quickly made it known. The owner of the slippers was taken into custody, and as this appeared to be a vicious revenge upon the Governor, he was sentenced to atone for it by paying a larger fine than either of the foregoing ones. But the Governor the slippers carefully back to him. "What now shall I do with you, ye accursed slippers?" said poor Casem. "I have given you over to the elements, and they have returned you, to cause me each time a greater loss; there remains but one means-now I will burn you." gave "But," continued he, shaking them, "you are so soaked with mud and water, that I must first lay you to dry in the sun; but I will take good care you do not come into my house again." With these words he went up to the flat roof of the house, and laid them under the vertical rays of the sun. Yet had not misfortune tried all her powers against him; indeed, her latest stroke was to be the hardest of all. A neighbor's pet monkey saw the slippers, jumped from his master's roof on to Casem's, seized upon and dragged them about. While he thus played with them, the unlucky slippers fell down and alighted on the head of a woman who was standing in the street below. Her husband brought his grievance before the Judge, and Casem had to atone for this more heavily than for aught before, for his innocent slippers had nearly killed one of his fellow-creatures. "Just Judge," said Casem, with an earnestness which made cven the Cadi smile, "I will endure and pay all and everything to which you have condemned me, only I ask your protection against those implacable enemies, which have been the agents of all my trouble and distress to this hour-I mean these miserable slippers. They have brought me to poverty, disgrace, ay, even to peril of my life; and who knows what else may follow? Be just, O noble Cadi, and make a determination that all misfortunes which can be clearly ascribed to the evil spirit which haunts these slippers, may be visited upon them, and not upon me." The Judge could not deny Casem's request: he kept those disturbers of public and private peace in his own possession, thinking he could give no better lesson to the miser than this which he had now learned at so much expense, namely, that it is better to buy a new pair of slippers when the old ones are worn out! SYNCHRONISTICS-THE YEAR 1618. LET fancy transport us back to a period when the earth was two hundred years younger, and blissfully inexperienced in English and French revolutions, (wherein she is by this time of day so accomplished a savant,) nor had yet learned to spell into memorable combinations the letters which to us have a burning significance in such names as Cromwell and Napoleon, Danton and Washington, Louis Quatorze, the Magnificent, and Louis Seize, the servant of servants. We take our stand at the year 1618. The place is Dort; the occasion is an ecclesiastical synod. Those venerable men disputing so keenly about questions for the discussion of which the Romish controversy has made them cunning masters of fence, are deputies from the leading reformed Churches, including the English. Hot-blooded Arminians and hard-headed Calvinists are reasoning high "Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fateFix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute." There you hear the metaphysical plati- or Menzel's "Germany," book xviii) have tudes of the honest German-his oracular just forced their way into the imperial deliverances plenteously spiced with palace at Prague, occupied at present by gutturals of profoundest bathos-quoting Ferdinand's plenipotentiary commissioners, huge excerpts from Dr. Martin and the Slawata and Martinitz, and demand a erudite Melancthon; not without intervals statement as to their share in the recent of dreamy dialectics, typical of the nation threatening proclamation from the throne, to which De Stael, or rather Jean Paul, directed against the heretical and disassigns the empire of the air. There, affected. The commissioners chafe these too, the "swag-bellied Hollander" figures, hot spirits into madness by a cavalier away in a dense imbroglio of chopping- port of supreme contempt and defiance. logic, and goes on refining, and classifying, Slawata and Martinitz cannot tread out a and analyzing, and systematizing, with the volcano in that way. They are seized by quiet gusto of one who has mounted his the angry deputation, dragged to the open hobby, and means to keep the animal window, and hurled from it down to the going as long as wind will let him. There, castle trench-a fall of some eighty feet. too, the animated Swiss, jealous for the Such is the initiative act of open rebellion. honor of John Calvin, to whom he assigns Such is the beginning of sorrows, the chapter the first in his private edition of opened floodgate of streaming, rushing, hero-worship, accounting him to be, among ever-swelling woes, which shall deluge all the worthies of a day in which giants Germany for thrice ten years, like stalked the earth, the facile princeps. And there, too, the practical sense and Protestant devotion of England has a representative in the person of good Bishop Hall-famous for witty satirical poems and large tomes of energetic prose. Mark the hush of attention that travels, like electric telegraph, athwart the assessors, when Simon Episcopius rises to speak "to the question." Alas! there is no lack of prejudice and intolerance among the partisans of either side; the flush that lights up many dim and furrowed cheeks is not altogether of holy joy. One would be grateful if, when doctors disagree, they were less fertile in opprobrious scorn, and in the rancorous invention of the tu quoque kind of skirmishing. Less scholasticism and more Christian forbearance, less dogmatism and more generous piety, were surely better. Let us away. Let us away! But an old adage saith, This is "Year One" of the Thirty Years' "The simultaneous tide when hid Volcanoes heave the ocean, and a long Vast wave engulfs an island." Sydney Yendys. At this time John Milton is a promising boy in his tenth year, gifted with an eye to mark, as few others can, the events and actors of the years to come-the struggle of the Wallensteins, and Tillys, and Piccolominis abroad, and of Lauds and Hampdens and Pyms at home. Edmund Waller is launching on his teens, and already enjoying the honors, substantial and otherwise, of an heir to three thousand a-year, and unconsciously collecting stores of impressions and sensations to be hereafter set down in mellifluous verse. A still finer genius than Waller, Abraham Cowley, is this year ushered into life, destined to die in that year which shall give "Paradise Lost" to the world, (for five pounds sterling.) Samuel Butler has not yet learned to speak plain, nor discarded petticoats, but is playing about his father's Worcestershire farm-yard, and as innocent of the idea of “ Hudibras” as that watch-dog careering at his side. Izaak Walton is a fine, healthy young "sempster," zealous for the interests of linen-drapery in business hours, and afterward hurrying with a light heart, rod in hand, to suburban rivers and pools, that he may "There meditate his time away, precarious living by his tragedies-a notable subject for the "Calamities of Authors" is this penury-stricken scholar. Corneille is only in his tenth year-the drama of France is in the future tense, (and, no question, the optative mood.) Rembrandt is of the same age. Rubens is at Antwerp, painting himself into renown more lasting than his colors; and his pupil Vandyke is bordering on man's estate, with a reversion of fame if not of immortality for him also. We have thus listened awhile to the beatings of the great heart of the world two centuries since. But death has bid them all "peace, be still," and lo, a great calm! LORD CHANCELLOR THURLOW. WITH and or singing "that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, "Come, live with me, and be my love," and resorting, with sharp appetite enough, to some favorite little alehouse with its "cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the walls," to make such a supper of his gallant trout as it would warm the heart of Christopher North to witness. Thomas Fuller is a quick-witted youngster of the same age as Milton in this one fact "alike; but O how different" in all besides! Jeremy Taylor is separated from lawn sleeves, and alb, and mitre, by many a summer and winter, being as yet a tiny member of the family of the unbreeched, and inclined to regard the alphabet as the Ultima Thule of ripe scholarship; unconscious hitherto of “Holy Living" other than that of the infancy which comes nearest, perhaps, to the ideal of its innocence, and to whom 'Holy Dying" is a mystery which pass-overawed and daunted his cotemporaries, eth all understanding. Roger l'Estrange and of which the impression is not wholly is just learning to walk, and Ralph Cud- lost even on posterity. It was a saying worth is not even in leading strings yet, of Mr. Fox, that no man ever yet was so his highest philosophy mere sensationalism wise as Thurlow looked. His countenance at present. Robert Burton, a Leicester- was fraught with sense, his aspect stately shire rector, is collating illustrations for and commanding, his brow broad, massy, his forthcoming magnum opus, the "Anat- and armed with terrors, like that of the omy of Melancholy," the only book that Olympian Jove, to which, indeed, it was ever took Dr. Johnson out of bed two often compared. His voice, loud, sonorhours sooner than he wished to rise. ous, and as rolling thunder in the distance, Lord Herbert of Cherbury is English augmented the effect of his fierce and terAmbassador at Paris, the delight of its rible invective. Few, indeed, were they elite, for his chivalrous demeanor, not who did not quail before his frown-fewer without a pungent spice of Quixotism in still who would abide his onset in debate. it, and there he is employing leisure hours Perhaps no modern English statesman, in in deistic researches, with a view to the the House of Lords at least, was ever so speedy publication of his "De Veritate." much dreaded. In Parliament, as at the Sir Walter Raleigh is at this very time bar, his speeches were home-thrusts, conterminating on the scaffold his brilliant veying the strongest arguments, or keenest career, telling the executioner that "so reproofs, in the plainest and clearest words. the heart be right, it matters not which His enemies might accuse his style of way the heart lies," and bidding him being coarse, and sometimes even ungram"fear not, but strike home." Bacon's matical, but they could never deny its star nears its culmination; another year, energy or its effect. In private life Thurlow and he will be Baron Verulam, Lord High was remarkable for his thorough knowledge Chancellor of England. Ben Jonson, too, of the Greek and Latin writers; and no in another year, will be poet laureate, less for his skill in argument and brilliant (having already produced his choicest powers of conversation. While yet at works, and for two summers since the the bar, Dr. Johnson said of him to Bosbard of Avon fell asleep headed the poets well-"I honor Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is of Britain,) and will pay that visit to a fine fellow he fairly puts his mind to William Drummond, of which we hear a yours." And after he became Chancellor, doggerel memento whenever we visit the the same high authority added-"I would grounds of sweet Hawthornden and ro- prepare myself for no man in England mantic Esk. Massinger is winning a but Lord Thurlow. When I am to meet him, I should like to know a day before." Unless with ladies, his manner was always uncouth, and his voice a constant growl. But beneath that rugged rind there appears to have lurked much warmth of affection and kindliness of heart. Many acts of generous aid and unsolicited bounty are recorded of him. Men of learning and merit seldom needed any other recommendation to his favor. Thus, on reading Horsley's Letters to Dr. Priestley, he at once obtained for the author a stall at Gloucester, saying-what I earnestly wish all other chancellors had borne in mindthat "those who supported the Church should be supported by it." Nevertheless, his temper, even when in some measure sobered down by age, was always liable to violent and unreasonable starts of passion. It is related by a gentleman who dined with him at Brighton only a few months before his death-for I must ever hold that great characters are best portrayed by little circumstances-that a plateful of peaches being brought in, the ex-chancellor, incensed at their ill appearance, ordered the window to be opened, and not only the peaches, but the whole dessert to be thrown out. SKILL LEADS TO FORTUNE-REMARK IT ABLE EXAMPLES. T will be recollected that one of Sir Walter Scott's sayings was, that "whatever might be said about luck, 'tis skill that leads to fortune!" There can be no doubt of this as a general principle. Few self-indulgent and apathetic men do well in any line of life. The skillful, the active, and the steadily persevering, usually carry off the prizes which turn up in the wheel of fortune. At the same time, something is due to circumstances, as well as to the Power which wisely controls human destiny, Practically, however, the thing to be borne in mind is, that the young are bound to exercise all proper means to secure improvement in their condition. That with a fair share of ambition, prudence, and meritorious skill, it may be possible to attain a station of eminence that is, "fortune," though perhaps not without corresponding responsibilities and cares-we present the following compendious list of distinguished men who rose from humble and obscure circumstances. Readers of Plutarch and other old historians will recollect that Æsop, Publius Syrus, Terence, and Epictetus-all distinguished men in ancient times-were slaves at their outset in life. Protagoras, a Greek philosopher, was at first a common porter; Cleanthes, another philosopher, was a pugilist, and also supported himself at first by drawing water and carrying burdens. The late Professor Heyne, of Gottingen, one of the greatest classical scholars of his own or any other age, was the son of a poor weaver, and for many years had to struggle with the most distressing poverty. The efforts of this excellent man of genius appear to have been greater and more protracted than those of any other on record; but he was finally rewarded with the highest honors. Bandoccin, one of the learned men of the sixteenth century, was the son of a shoemaker, and worked many years at the same business. Gelli, a celebrated Italian writer, began life as a tailor; and although he rose to eminence in literature, never forgot his original profession, which he took pleasure in mentioning in his lectures. The elder Opie, whose talent for painting was well appreciated, was originally a working carpenter in Cornwall, and was discovered by Dr. Wolcott-otherwise Peter Pindar-working as a sawyer at the bottom of a saw-pit. Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, who flourished in the sixteenth century, and distinguished himself by opposing the schemes of Charles I., was the son of a cloth-worker at Guildford. Akenside, the author of "Pleasures of Imagination," was the son of a butcher in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. D'Alembert, the French mathematician, was left at the steps of a church by his parents, and brought up by a poor woman as a foundling, yet arrived at great celebrity, and never forgot or abandoned his nurse. Ammenius Saccophorus, founder of the Mystic philosophy at Alexandria, was born in poverty, and originally earned his subsistence by carrying sacks of wheat-whence the latter part of his name. Amyot, a French author of some celebrity for his version of Plutarch, lived in the sixteenth century, and was at first so poor as to be unable to afford oil or candles to assist his studies, which he had to carry on by fire-light; and all the sustenance his parents could afford him was a loaf of bread weekly. George Anderson, the translator of a treatise of Archimedes, and author of a "General View of the East India Company's Affairs," who died in 1796, was originally a day-laborer. Masaniello, who headed a successful revolt against the tyranny of the Austrian government at Naples, was a poor seller of fish. Sir Richard Arkwright, the ingenious inventor of the machinery for spinning cotton, was originally a country barber, or dealer in hair. Arne, an eminent English composer of music, who died in 1778, was the only son of an upholsterer, and was himself brought up as an attorney's clerk. Astle, the archæologist, and author of a work on the origin and progress of writing, was the son of the keeper of Needwood Forest. Augereau, Marshal of France, and Duke de Castiglione, under Bonaparte, was originally a private soldier in the French and Neapolitan ranks. John Bacon, an eminent sculptor of last century, was originally a painter of porcelain for potters. Sir Humphrey Davy was the son of a carver on wood, and he himself began as an apprentice to an apothecary. Baillet, a laborious and learned French writer, was born of poor parents at Neuville in Picardy, but he extricated and raised himself by his genius. Ballard, the author of "Memoirs of British Ladies," was originally a stay and habit maker; but being patronized for his acquirements, he was educated at Oxford, and made beadle of that university. Barker, the inventor of pictorial representation by panorama, having failed in business, became a miniature-painter, and settled in Edinburgh; and it was while resident here, and taking a view from the Calton Hill, that the idea of forming a panorama entered his mind. His invention realized him a fortune. Beattie, the author of the "Minstrel," and Professor of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen University, was originally a parish schoolmaster at Fordun. Belzoni, one of the most eminent travelers in Egypt, at one period, when in pecuniary difficulties, supported himself by exhibiting feats of strength in different towns in Great Britain. The famous Admiral Benbow served at first as a common sailor in a merchant vessel. Miss Benger, the authoress of the "Life of Mary Queen of Scots," and many other productions of merit, was so very poor in early life, that, for the sake of reading, she used to peruse the pages of books in a bookseller's window in a little town in Wiltshire, where she resided, and returned day after day, in the hope of finding another page turned over. She afterwards obtained friends who assisted her. Sebastian Castalio, the elegant Latin translator of the Bible, was born of poor peasants, who lived among the mountains of Dauphine. The Abbe Hautefeuille, who distinguished himself in the seventeenth century by his inventions in clock and watch making, was the son of a baker. The eminent Prideaux, who rose to be Bishop of Winchester, was born of such poor parents that they could with difficulty keep him at school, and he acquired the rudiments of his education by acting as an assistant in the kitchen of Exeter College, Oxford. Sir Edmund Saunders, ChiefJustice of the King's Bench in the reign of Charles II., was originally an errand-boy to the young lawyers at the Temple-chambers in London. Linnæus was apprenticed to a shoemaker, with whom he wrought for some time, till rescued by a generous patron, who saw his genius for learning. Lomonosoff, one of the most celebrated Russian poets of last century, began life as a poor fisherboy. The famous Ben Jonson worked for some years as a bricklayer; but while he had a trowel in his hand, he had a book in his pocket. Peter Ramus, a celebrated writer of the sixteenth century, was at first a shepherdboy, and obtained his education by serving as a lackey to the College of Navarre. | Longomantanus, the Danish astronomer, was the son of a laborer. Parens, Professor of Theology at Heidelberg, and an eminent divine, was at first an apprentice to a shoemaker. Hans Sacho, an eminent German poet and scholar, was the son of a tailor, and he himself wrought as a shoemaker for many years. John Folcz, an old German poet, was a barber. Lucast Cornelisz, a Dutch painter of the sixteenth century, had occasionally to support his family as a cook in gentlemen's kitchens. The illustrious Kepler spent his life in poverty, but in apparent contentment. Winckelman was so poor while a student, that he sang ballads through the streets at night for his support. Wolfgang Musculus commenced his career in a similar manner, having for some time sung ballads through the country, and begged from door to door, |