his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius, according to Livy, corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable example. His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates; he, being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means. one day to shut up the senators in the palace, and calling the people together in the market-place, he told them that the day was now come wherein, at full liberty, they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by whom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and unarmed, at his mercy; and advised that they should call them out one by one by lot, and should particularly determine of every one, causing whatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this caution, that they should at the same time depute some honest man in the place of him that was condemned, to the end that there might be no vacancy in the senate. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator, but a great cry of universal dislike was raised up against him. 'I see,' says Pacuvius, we must get rid of him; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good one in his room.' Immediately there was a profound silence, every one being at a stand who to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against him, a hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just reasons being presently given why he should not stand. These contradictory humors growing hot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being as much disagreement in the election of the new, as

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consent in the putting out of the old. In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and best known evil. was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."

But do not

"Among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less." "The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. laugh at the poor African," pleads Heine," for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him."

It is even harder, when he is most barbarous and besotted in his ignorance, to disturb his complacency and self-conceit. "It was most ludicrous," says Darwin, "to watch through a glass the Indians, as often as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance, throw them towards the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A boat was then sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them. The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain rage. At last, seeing the balls cut and strike the trees, they ran away, and we were left in peace and quietness.'

You remember the famous contest of Dr. Johnson,

in Billingsgate. He was passing through the market, as the story goes, with Goldsmith, when he was rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I will bring her down, Goldy, without degrading myself," whispered Johnson. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her, deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great moralist with his big voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never heard swearing like that.

Curran, we are told, used to relate a ludicrous encounter between himself and a fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her," said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment, and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of opprobrium. Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, what do you mean by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother

was!' Never was victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory."

A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing." "Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs. Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the morning; and that she never read

over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I don't know," said Newton, "what I may seem to the world; but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of Time lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet, "The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first

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