Compaind Simple

Complex

their faint pip, pip, pop! sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, where they know I shall not suspect them of robbing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store. They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-tree! After they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. "Do I look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw vermin? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any honest robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. J. R. LOWELL. 1at of the original tenTo spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar; they perfect nature and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded Pin by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor. to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, "?but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others

Essay on citrdres

to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little. he had need have a present wit; and, if he read little, he had

need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. FRANCIS BACON.

Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness, purity, high-mindedness-these are the qualities before which the free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no [other] order of men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule, because they deserved to rule; and, in the fulness of reverence, kings and nobles bent before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed, defenceless men reigned supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them, they brought them really and truly to believe, that they had immortal souls, and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment-bar and give account for their lives, there. With the brave, the honest, and the good, with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their neighbor's landmark, with those who had been just in all their dealings, with those who had fought against evil, and had tried valiantly to do their Master's will,-at that great day it would be well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death. An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually instilled into the mind of Europe.

J. A. FROUDE.

But I cannot sound the depth of Iago's cunning; in attempting to thread his intricacies, my mind gets bewildered. Sleepless, unrelenting, inexhaustible, with an energy that never flags, and an alertness that nothing can surprise, he outwits every obstacle, and turns it into a help. By the working of his devilish arts,

the Moor is brought to distrust all his own original perceptions, to renounce his own understanding, and to see everything just as Iago would have him see it. Craving for action of the most exciting kind, there is a fascination for Iago in the very danger of crime. Walking the plain, safe, straightforward path of truth and right does not excite and occupy him enough; he prefers to thread the dark, perilous intricacies of some hellish plot, or to balance himself, as it were, on a rope stretched over an abyss where danger stimulates, and success demonstrates, his agility. He has, in short, an insatiable itching of mind, which finds relief in roughing it through the briers and thickets of diabolical undertakings. Or, to vary the figure once more, it is as if one should be so taken with a passion for dancing over eggs as to make an open floor seem vapid and dull. Even if remorse overtake such a man, its effect is to urge him deeper into crime; as the desperate gamester naturally tries to bury his chagrin at past losses in the increased excitement of a larger stake.

H. N. HUDSON.

If the "thousand souled " Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben Jonson as unmistakably stands for Englishkind. He is Saxon England in epitome,-John Bull passing from a name into a man—a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineering individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be severed, even in thought, from his body and personal appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's character, and his character took symbolic form in his physical frame. He seemed built up, mentally as well as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton and Canary; or, to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of the land, of the soil as well as the soul of England. He is a very pleasant boon companion as long as we make our idea of his importance agree with his own; but, the instant we attempt to dissect his intellectual pretensions, the living animal becomes a dangerous subject, his countenance flames, his great hands double up, his thick lips begin to twitch with impending invective; and, while the critic's impression of him is thus all the more vivid, he is checked. in its expression, by a very natural

fear of the consequences. There is no safety but in taking this rowdy leviathan of letters at his own valuation; and the relation of critics towards him is as perilous as that of the juries towards the Irish advocate who had an unpleasant habit of challenging them to a personal combat whenever they brought in a verdict against any of his clients. There is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's self-assertion, that he bullies posterity as he bullied his contemporaries; and, while we admit his claims to rank next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age, we beg our readers to understand that we do it under intimidation. E. P. WHIPPLE.

No sovereign could have jarred against the conception of an English ruler which had grown up under the Tudors more utterly than James I. His big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs, his goggle eyes, stood out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as his gabble and rodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his coarse buffoonery, his drunkenness, his pedantry, his contemptible cowardice. Under this ridiculous behavior, however, lay a man of much natural ability, a ripe scholar, with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother wit, and ready repartee. His canny humor lights up the political and theological controversies of the times with quaint, incisive phrases, with puns and epigrams and touches of irony, which still retain their savor. His reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestinarianism to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase of Henry IV., "the wisest [most learned] fool in Christendom." He had the temper of a pedant, and with it a pedant's love of theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual facts. All might have gone well had he confined himself to speculations about witchcraft, about predestination, about the noxiousness of smoking. Unhappily for England and his successor, he clung yet more passionately to theories which contained within them the seeds of a death-struggle between his people and the Crown. He chose to regard the phrase “an

absolute monarchy," used by the Tudor statesmen, as implying

a monarch's freedom from all control by law.

J. R. GREEN.

At the first real lie

I would have a woman as true as Death. which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow. Proud she may

be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride, in the sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the punishments are small-pox and bankruptcy. She who nips off the end of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people gracious in proper measure to all; but, if a woman puts on airs with her equals, she has something about herself or her family she is ashamed of or ought to be. Better too few words from the woman we love than too many: while she is silent, nature is working for her; while she talks, she is working for herself. Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

O. W. HOLMES.

LESSON 75.

EXTRACTS FOR THE CRITICAL STUDY OF STYLE.

Direction.-Do with these extracts as directed with those of the

preceding Lesson:

Writing for the general public, Shakespeare used such language as would convey his meaning to his auditors-the common phraseology of his period, But what a language was