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Let it be once stated, in strict confidence, that you stripped off your great-coat on a winter night, and wrapped it round a shivering, homeless wanderer, and the town will soon ring with your deeds of philanthropy -but the little incident must always be related as a profound secret, or its progress towards the popular ear will be slow. Such is the natural tendency of a secret to get into general circulation, and to secure the privilege of continual disclosure, that it will even carry the heavy virtues with it, and obtain popularity for desert. The gallery of the moral graces is a whispering-gallery.

The title of the old comedy written by a woman makes it a wonder that a woman should keep a secret; the real wonder is, that man should ever have had the desperate assurance to assume a superiority, to claim a more consistent fidelity, in such engagements. The sexes are doubtless well-matched, and the ready tongue finds a ready ear.

How many of those who stand, and will ever stand most firmly and strongly by our side in the hard battle of life, are weak in this delicate respect! How much of the divine love that redeems our clay from utter grossness, the hallowed affection that knits together the threads of two lives in one, is sullied and debased by this mortal frailty-the propensity to whisper when the heart prompts silence-to breathe, by the mere force of habit, into an indifferent or a curious ear, some inklings of the secret which the hushed soul should have held sacred and incommunicable for ever!

Let us, however, do justice to the just, and wish they were not the minority in the matter of keeping secrets. Let us even spare the weakness that errs through accidental temptation, so long as it does not degenerate into the vice that wilfully betrays. Let us remember how the crime of treachery carries with it its own punish

ment; and how the abject thing that deliberately reveals what was confided to it in reliance upon its honour, makes in the very act a verbal confession of its own unutterable falsehood. The secret so betrayed

should be published as a lie.

Let it moreover be some consolation to think that there are more people incapable of a breach of confidence, than those who, like the prince of praters, Charles Glib, never had a secret intrusted to them in their lives. One of them I met this morning-it was a friend to whom, of all others, every man would feel safe in confiding his private griefs, the dearest secrets of his soul.

"After the stab I have just received," cried I, encountering my friend, "in a base betrayal of confidence, how pleasant to fix my trusting eyes once more upon such a face as yours; the face which is the mirror of your mind, but without revealing any one thing that requires to be concealed in its close and friendly recesses. It is now fifteen years since I intrusted to your sympathising bosom that dreadful and most secret story of my quarrel in Malta, and of my sudden flight-of the monstrous but reiterated charge of murder that dogged my steps, through so many cities of Europe, and cast upon my onward path a shadow-"

"Eh! what!"

"Yes," said I, in continuation, with a fervent, a most exalted sense of the steady affection which had kept my youthful secret unwhispered, undreamed of by the most curious, the most insidious scrutineer; with an idolatrous admiration of the constancy and the delicacy of the fine mind and the warm heart on which I had so wisely relied; "yes," I exclaimed, "fifteen or sixteen years have elapsed since I committed to your holy keeping the ghastly secret, and not even in your sleep have you allowed a single syllable of the awful narrative to

escape you! Who, after this, shall so far belie his fellow, as to say that a secret is never so safe as in one's own bosom!"

"What you say, my dear fellow," returned this faithful possessor of my confidence, "is quite right; but I don't exactly know what you are talking about; for upon my soul, to tell you the truth, I had entirely forgotten the whole affair, having never bestowed a thought upon it from that day to this!"

ADVICE GRATIS.

THE Advice which the author of L'Allegro describes -Advice "with scrupulous head"-springs from so very distant a branch of the family to which Advice 'gratis" belongs, that there can hardly be said to be any actual relationship existing between them. Assuredly there is not the smallest personal resemblance.

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"Advice gratis" wears a remarkably unscrupulous aspect. He has a long tongue which hangs half out of his mouth, a long sight which detects the approach of a victim before he has turned the corner, a long finger to twine round the button of a hapless listener, and a short memory which causes him to recommend two opposite remedies to the same patient, both wrong

ones.

He is a creature wholly destitute of imagination, and although constantly found in the company of another, never yet saw anything out of himself. He substitutes self for the person he advises, and devoutly recommends as adapted to his fellow what is suited only to his own case. He never cares to consider whe

ther you have a weak or a strong sight, so that you consent to wear his spectacles, with which you cannot see at all. He will set you dancing, but it must be in the tight boots or the crazy slippers he himself is wearing. In whatsoever you may seek his help, he offers what agrees with him, and not what agrees with you. In a pining atrophy, he bids you adopt the system applicable to his own gout.

"Advice gratis" appears to be attended with one just principle that it is always disposed of at its exact value; but this is an error; for seldom can we follow advice gratis, for nothing.

That the strongest and wisest, the best armed and the most knowing, often need advice, is not to be denied; the king's minister might have taken it profitably from the lips of the king's jester upon a thousand occasions. Great wits may sometimes get very needful help from very dull people; as we see an eclipse best by looking through smoked glass.

The bone-knife, there is no disputing the fact, was found, with its blunt edge, a better paper-cutter than the razor; but ever since the days of Swift-and before, even up to the birth of History-the bone-knife has boasted of itself as decidedly the best instrument to shave with.

It is so with the clever people who press their service at all times and in all ways in the form of advice. Because they are not voted utterly useless, they must claim to be useful universally. Because you needed a few drops of advice once, you must be drenched with it. The physician might wait till he is called in; but he bursts upon us at all hours and places-insisting that we shall take the draught, because it would do him good. The advice-giver will compel us to have our new shoes made by his last.

It may be argued that the widely-prevailing habit of proffering advice, unasked and unwanted, upon all subjects, is a token of philanthropic concern and charitable interest in the affairs of humanity. It does seem generous in idle people to bestow their wise thoughts and precious time upon us of their own free will, and as often as they are not solicited.

When our old acquaintance in story lost his horse, nobody gave him one in place of it; but when he lost his wife, every family in town offered him another. Thus it is, that this much-vilified human nature will give away a part of itself, its flesh and blood, its finest store of mental wealth, its scanty allowance even of invaluable and irrecoverable time, for the benefit of one who neither claims nor needs the gift.

But in answer to this, it must be urged, that the advice-giver does not actually make a sacrifice, on the score either of thought or time; for though he may put his tongue to some little trouble, it does not often happen that he troubles his brain about the business; and as for the intricate affairs over which you, who best know them, have pondered long-presto! he simplifies and cuts them short in half a second!

Before any of us doubt, let us call to mind how slowly men deliberate upon their own concerns, and in what an off-hand and summary way they decide upon the same points submitted for their judgment by others.

When a step involving important but doubtful consequences is before us, we draw back, pause, advance, shrink again, ponder, look behind, try the ground with the foot, flinch, resolve finally, and yet are slow to take it; but in the case of a friend pausing at the very same step, we drag him back or push him on without much consultation. We look at the position from our pointof view, not from his, and see few of the difficulties

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