The spinster pull'd her door to with a slam,
That sounded like a wooden d-n,

For so some moral people, strictly loth

To swear in words, however up,

Will crash a curse in setting down a cup, Or through a doorpost vent a banging oath— In fact, this sort of physical transgression

Is really no more difficult to trace
Than in a given face

A very bad expression.

However, in she went,

Leaving the subject of her discontent To Mr. Jones's Clerk at Number Ten; Who, throwing up the sash,

With accents rash,

Thus hail'd the most vociferous of men :

"Come, come, I say old fellow, stop your chant!

I cannot write a sentence-no one can't!

So just pack up your trumps,

And stir your stumps-"

Says he, "I shan't!"

Down went the sash

As if devoted to "eternal smash"

(Another illustration

Of acted imprecation),

While close at hand, uncomfortably near, The independent voice, so loud and strong, And clanging like a gong,

Roar'd out again the everlasting song,

"I have a silent sorrow here!"

The thing was hard to stand!

The Music-master could not stand it-
But rushing forth with fiddlestick in hand,
As savage as a bandit,

Made up directly to the tatter'd man,
And thus in broken sentences began-
But playing first a prelude of grimaces,
Twisting his features to the strangest shapes,
So that to guess his subject from his faces,
He meant to give a lecture upon apes-

"No-no-you scream and bawl!

You must not come at all!

You have no rights, by rights, to beg—

You have not one off leg

You ought to work-you have not some complaintYou are not cripple in your back or bones

Your voice is strong enough to break some stones"Says he "It aint!"

"I say you ought to labour!

You are in a young case,

You have not sixty years upon your face,
To come and beg your neighbour !
And discompose his music with a noise,
More worse than twenty boys-
Look what a street it is for quiet!

No cart to make a riot,

No coach, no horses, no postilion,
If you will sing, I say, it is not just
To sing so loud."-" Says he, "I MUST!
I'm SINGING FOR THE MILLION!"

SHORT RIDES IN AN AUTHOR'S OMNIBUS.

GOOD LATIN NEED NOT BE BAD LOYALTY.

WOLSEY certainly seemed disposed to arrogate to himself all the cardinal privileges to the neglect of the virtues, but he was not altogether so presumptuous as he was painted by his enemies; and the supposed haughtiness, if not high treason, of his writing.

Ego et rex meus"-(I and my king) only shows the ignorance of his accusers, and his own critical knowledge of the Latin language, which would not admit any other collocation of the words.

Thus when Apuleius exclaims in his "Apologia,"-" Hoc in me accusas quod ego et Maximus in Aristotele miramur ?" The Scholiast explains, Non est arrogantiæ tribuendum, quod se ante Claudium Maximum Proconsulem nominet: ita enim et ratio et consuetudo Latini sermones postulabat."—(His thus naming himself before the Proconsul Claudius Maximus is not to be attributed to arrogance, for it was required by the form and custom of the Latin tongue.)

So when the elder Vestris made use of the words, "Moi et le Roi de France," there was not the smallest arrogance or impropriety in the phrase, for he viewed himself as the recognised Dieu de la Danse, and reverentially placed the celestial before the earthly potentate.

PUFFING.

SOME may have imagined, in their simplicity, that Sheridan in the "Critic," had exhausted all the varieties of this multiform art, but experience shows that we had formerly much more imaginative puffers than the modern dramatists. Richard Brinsley never dreamed of a paragraph like the following extract from the bookseller's address to the reader, prefixed to the second part of Dr. Echard's Works, published in 1697, and dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury.

"And now, reader, tell me, art thou so void of all conscience, reason, and thy own benefit, as not to carry home this book? Read but five pages of it, spring and fall, and for that year thou art certainly secured from all fevers, agues, coughs, catarrhs, &c. Champ three or four lines of it in a morning, it scours and clarifies the teeth, it settles and confirms the jaws, and brings a brisk and florid colour into the cheeks. The very sight of the book does so scare all cramps, boneaches, running gouts, and the like, that they wont come within a stone's cast of your house.

"Hast thou a wife and children, and are they dear to thee? Here's a book for that dear wife and for those dear children, for it does not only sing, dance, play on the lute, and speak French, ride the great horse, &c.; but it performs all family duties. It runs for a midwife, it rocks the cradle, combs the child's head, sweeps the house, milks the cows, turns the hogs out of the corn, whets knives, lays the cloth, grinds corn, beats hemp, winds up the jack, brews, bakes, washes, and pays off servants their wages exactly at quarter-day; and all this it does at the same day, and is never out of breath."

Were such an omnifarious work to be published in these days of

comprehensive compendiums, it ought to be entitled, "Every Body's every-thing Book."

THE TU QUOQUE ARGUMENT.

In a certain senatorial house,

If you mention fee or bribe,

'Tis so pat to all the tribe,

Each swears that was levell'd at me ;

and each never dreaming of any other defence than recrimination, rests satisfied with retaliating the charge until he feels it impossible to deny.

"I accuse the honourable member for Goldborough," exclaims an indignant patriot, "of corruption and bribery, so notorious, that if he have the least sense of decency he will walk out of the house."

"And I," returns the party inculpated, "accuse my accuser of malpractices so much more flagrant, that if he have the least sense of decency he will walk out of the house!"

What a happy illustration do they afford of the following little tale from Maitre Jean Picard!

A Norman peasant having been all day employed at ditch-digging, arrived during a pouring rain at his own door, weary, drenched, and bedraggled; when instead of the ready dinner and blazing fire, which he had anticipated, his wife exclaimed,

"Good Heavens, Pierre!" what a filthy plight you are in! It rains cats and dogs; but as you can't be any dirtier or wetter than you are, you may as well step down to the village pump, and bring home a bucket of water."

Without saying a word, Pierre took the bucket, filled it from an offensive standing pool at a little distance, returned to the cottage, and threw the whole contents over his wife, crying out, as he leisurely sat himself down,

"Mercy on us, Marguerite! what a muck you are in! You can't be any dirtier or wetter than you are, so you may as well step down to the village pump."

TRIMMERS.

What literary and clever Parisian could have made the same declaration as Fontenelle.

"I am a Frenchman-I am eighty years of age-and yet I have never ridiculed the smallest virtue."

His conscientious and laudable scruples, did not, however, preserve him from censure and even punishment, for certain opinions which were decried heterodox. Having attributed, in one of his works, all belief in oracles to superstition and ignorance, the pious Madame de Maintenon made Louis XIV. withdraw his pension from him, a privation which the author considered a much more serious evil than his imputed want of orthodoxy. Reflecting, however, that a confession wrung by torture, whether corporeal or financial, is, in fact, no confession at all; that a man convinced upon compulsion, "is of the same opinion still;" and that Galileo, while he publicly abjured his solar theory, retained the conviction of its truth more firmly than ever, Fontenelle consented to write a sort of Palinode or recantation, on the condition of his pension being restored to him.

Desdemona saw the Moor's complexion in his mind; and a dark or dirty deed may assume a very fair aspect when we look at it through the purse. That man must be a sturdy moralist who does not prefer his cash to his conscience, and what casuist ever wanted an excuse for a profitable transgression?

"I may have sold justice," said Bacon, when accused of judicial corruption; "but I was never base enough to sell injustice."

For stopping a man's mouth, when he is in the habit of uttering disagreeable truths, there is no gag like gold. Complaint having been made to a certain bishop that a vicar in his diocese was always preaching against pluralities, in spite of repeated admonitions to the con

trary.

"Tush!" exclaimed the right reverend dignitary. "I will silence him for ever in less than a week”—and so he did, by giving an additional benefice.

PARCHMENT AND ISINGLASS.

As the intelligent reader must already be perfectly well aware of the fact, we make that our reason (more dramatico) for informing him that parchment derives its name from Pergamus, a town of Mysia, where prepared sheepskins were first used for the transcription of books; Ptolemy, the King of Egypt, having forbidden the exportation of Papyrus, in order to prevent the formation of a library at Pergamus, which might rival that of Alexandria. The Pergameneans, however, with the assistance of their newly-discovered parchment, managed to collect two hundred thousand volumes, which Cleopatra, with the permission of Antony, transported to Egypt, and added to the Alexandrian library, where they remained until the whole were destroyed by the Saracens.

It is equally well known to the ingenious reader,-which is our sole reason for telling him that isinglass, or icthyocolla is, as its Latin name imports, a species of glue, prepared from a cartilaginous fish; but it may not be known to him, that as the genuine commodity is always dear, a spurious isinglass is manufactured from old Parchment, of which a startling confirmation is afforded by the following extract from the preface to the fourth volume of Miss Strickland's admirable work, "The Lives of the Queens of England."

"It is a national disgrace most deeply to be lamented, that so many of the muniments of our history, more especially those connected with the personal expenditure of royalty, should have perished among the ill-treated records of the exchequer. It has been reported, whether in jest or sober sadness we cannot say, that some tons of those precious parchments were converted into isinglass."-p. xiv.

"Think of that, Master Brooke!" Think of rolls, records, acts of parliament, marriage contracts, public and private treaties, all going literally to pot, and being melted down; all being literally dished and served up to a voracious public in the form of jellies and blancmange!

"To what bare uses may we not return?" This beats "imperious Cæsar dead and turned to clay"-by the whole difference between an argillaceous and a gelatinous residuum. An ancient legislator said that he had rather write his laws upon the hearts of men than on the skins of beasts; and he had good reason, for hearts, however soft,