not heed me but when I am got three feet above the earth," that was, into the pulpit. Cotton Mather has preserved a choice specimen of invective against Dr. Owen, by one of the primitive Quakers, whose name was Fisher. It was, says Southey, a species of rhetoric in which they indulged freely, and exceeded all other sectarians. Fisher addressed him thus: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter; thou hedgehog and grinning dog; thou bastard, that tumbled out of the mouth of the Babylonish bawd; thou mole; thou tinker; thou lizard; thou bell of no metal, but the tone of a kettle; thou wheelbarrow; thou whirlpool; thou whirligig; oh, thou firebrand; thou adder and scorpion; thou louse; thou cow-dung; thou moon-calf; thou ragged tatterdemalion; thou Judas: thou livest in philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." The good Luther was a violent saint sometimes. Hear him express himself on the Catholic divines: "The papists are all asses, and will always remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat, hashed, they are always the same asses.' Hear him salute the pope : "The pope was born out of the devil's posteriors. He is full of devils, lies, blasphemies, and idolatries; he is anti-Christ; the robber of churches; the ravisher of virgins; the greatest of pimps; the governor of Sodom, etc. If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls

of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII. "It is hard to say if folly can be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of a knave. This rotten worm of the earth, having blasphemed the majesty of my King, I have a just right to bespatter his English majesty with his own dirt and ordure. This Henry has lied." The good Calvin was alike violent. He hated Catholic and Lutheran. "His adversaries are never others than knaves, lunatics, drunkards, and assassins. Sometimes they are characterized by the familiar appellatives of bulls, asses, cats, and hogs." Beza, the disciple of Calvin, imitated his master. Upon a Lutheran minister, Tilleman, he bestowed these titles of honor: "Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass who is distinguished from other asses by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we find.” As to the Catholics, there is no end to the anathemas and curses of the Fathers.

way he trod.

One of the old bishops called anger "the sinews of the soul." It helped to fortify the rugged reformer in his conflicts, and illuminated the perilous "We oft by lightning read in darkest nights." It is said the finest wine is pressed from vintages which grow on fields once inundated with lava. "I never work better," said Luther, "than when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well; for then my whole

temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart." Burke said, "a vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat." "No revolution (in public sentiment), civic or religious," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, "can be accomplished without that degree of ardor and passion which, in a later age, will be matter of ridicule to men who do not feel the occasion, and enter into the spirit of the times." "Our passions," said John Norris, "were given us to perfect and accomplish our natures, though by accidental misapplications to unworthy objects, they may turn to our degradation and dishonor. We may, indeed, be debased as well as ennobled by them; but then the fault is not in the large sails, but in the ill conduct of the pilot, if our vessel miss the haven." When one commended Charillus, the king of Sparta, for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said, "How can he be good who is not an enemy even to vicious persons?" Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes like a raving ribald. "When he was angry, invectives rushed from him like bowlder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood." But of vanity he had no trace. "Do not call yourselves Lutherans," he said; "call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?"

"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor hardly

to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and once on seeing my father, in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with Esop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." Layard relates an incident of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords, and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together," God be praised, we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have

taken from the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran, raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions. Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman," who was so devoted to abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts, and studying metaphysics." "Perhaps few narratives in history or mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions, verging, indeed, towards a certain far deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung ' remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid