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precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,

"Now, lords, my choler being overblown
With walking once about the quadrangle,
I come to talk of commonwealth affairs."

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton's secretary, Mr. Nixon, on his own showing, could not refrain from blurting out just what he felt at the moment, when differences arose between the two. This used to vex Sir Thomas, who however would say nothing till the next day, and then, when the secretary thought that the whole matter had passed off (having perhaps received great kindness in the meantime), the remonstrance would come out, "What a silly fellow you were, Nixon, to put yourself in such a passion yesterday! If I had spoken then, we should most probably have parted. Make it a rule never to speak when you are in a passion, but wait till the next day."

And we are assured that, if at any time he happened to transgress this rule himself, he was seriously vexed and grieved, and could not rest till he had in some way made amends for his want of selfrestraint.

Molière's Arnolphe propounds the prophylactic rule with emphasis and discretion :

"Un certain Grec disait à l'empereur Auguste,
Comme une instruction utile autant que juste,
Que lorsqu'une aventure en colére nous met,
Nous devons, avant tout, dire notre alphabet,
Afin que dans ce temps la bile se tempère,
Et qu'on ne fasse rien que l'on ne doive faire."

EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW.

HOSEA vi. 3.

Y the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell

BY

on Ephraim and on Judah, that their goodness was as a

morning cloud, and that as the early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words of Dante :

The will in man

Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise
Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain,
Made mere abortion: faith and innocence

Are met with but in babes; each taking leave
Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled."

Adam Smith observes, in his "Theory of Moral Sentiment," that, in the eye of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy. "It ought to do so," he adds. "Everything may be expected, or at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be either expected or hoped from the old man." It is regretful, remorseful eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,

"O little souls! as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light

Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,

How red my setting sun appears,

How lurid looks this soul of mine!"

Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the "Pleasures of Memory," and with direct reference to that poem, "In looking back, the only days I earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was 'girt with growing infancy,' and read in the eyes and the smiles of my children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness, such as this world can never fulfil." A more vigorous poet than Samuel Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of young motherhood, when the wife

"Blest into mother, in the innocent look,

Or even the piping cry of lips that brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives

Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook

She sees her little bud put forth its leaves

What may the fruits be yet?—I know not-Cain was Eve's." The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell's story hails in her child a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. "And her mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children."

Juvenal asks, "what morn's so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy, and fraud." The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child : dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting in its refreshing redolence of promise-"qui ne nous fait que des promesses." Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second birthday :

"Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour,

Sweet is the sun's first radiance, sweet the year,
In the spring's early promise, sweet the flower,
Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear-
But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me

Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind,
That beams with new quick thoughts, yet undefined,

That tell of what is now and what may be.

O may the God who taught us that, like thee,

We should be pure and spotless, bless thee still;

Lay on thy infant head His hand, to free

Thine heart from sin, and form thee to His will,
Cleanse thee from aught that's evil or defiled,

And keep thee as thou art, my darling child."

George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach-impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had

been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it "chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining." Elia, the essay writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that "other me," there, in the background, he must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master-with as little reference, he protests, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not his father's son. "I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!"

Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory faces in the dame school :

"Even now sagacious foresight points to show

A little bench of heedless bishops here,

And there a chancellor in embryo,

Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so,

As Milton, Shakspeare, names that ne'er shall die!"

So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie's lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood :—

"Ah! many a lightly sportive child,
Who hath like thee our wits beguiled,
To dull and sober manhood grown,
With strange recoil our hearts disown."

Il y a en chacun de nous, writes Sainte-Beuve, un être primitif, idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais que l'homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt. Mr. Kingsley, in a touching reflection-literally reflection, looking back-on the "long lost might-have been," adverts to that personal idea which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Dr. Caird has said of the birthday of the worst of men, that although it ushered a new agent of evil into existence, and was a day fraught with more disastrous results to the world than the day in which the pestilence began to creep over the nations, or the blight to fasten on the food of man, or any other physical evil to enter on a career of worldwide devastation,-yet might this day, when the vilest of humanity first saw the light, be in some aspects of it regarded as better (despite Solomon's text) than the day of his death. "For, to take only one view of it, when life commenced, the problem of good or evil, to which death has brought so terrible a solution, was, in his case, as yet unsolved. The page of human history which he was to write was yet unwritten, and to that day belonged, at all events, the advantage of the uncertainty whether it was to be blurred and blotted, or written fair and clean." Life, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, it is urged, has ever some faint gleams of hope to brighten its outset. The preacher owns that the simplicity, the tenderness, the unconscious refinement that more or less characterize infancy, even among the lowest and rudest, soon indeed pass away, and give place to the coarseness of an unideal, if not the animal repulsiveness of a sensual or sinful life. But he insists that at least at the beginning, for a little while, there is something in the seeming innocency, the brightness, the unworldliness, the unworn freshness of childhood, that gives hope room to work. Is there not, he asks, for every child, not in the dreams of parental fondness only, but in reality, and in God's idea, the possibility of a noble future? "The history of each new-born soul is surely in God's plan and intention a bright

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