To

sans intérêt, qui se soutient un peu par les machines et les décorations." This is only partially true. him who is willing to sit quietly in the front of the house, and lend himself to the illusion of the stage, the world is a goodly, glorious, and magnificent drama, possessing the deepest of all interests, and exciting the pleasantest or the sublimest of all sensations: but if, in our busy and mischievous anxiety for ferreting out the real truth, we insist upon going behind the scenes, we have no one to blame but ourselves if "we lose by seeking what we hope to find;" if we turn in disgust from the painted visages, narrow intellects, and heartless indifference of the actors, while we contemplate with scorn the tinsel decorations and palpable trickery which so lately deluded us into astonishment and rapture. Then, indeed, the world becomes what Champfort has described it to be: but if a man will wither up his soul by plunging into the moral desert, when he might be luxuriating in some smiling Oasis, let him not complain of that barrenness and suffering which is wilful and self-inflicted. The last-quoted author himself confesses that" Il y des hommes à qui les illusions sur les choses qui les intéressent sont aussi nécessaires que la vie. Quelquefois cependant ils ont des aperçus qui feroient croire qu'ils sont près de la vérité; mais ils s'en éloignent bien vîte, et ressemblent aux enfans qui courent après un masque, et qui s'enfuient si le masque vient à se retourner."

a

Such men are right in flying from the Medusean head, which, by dissipating their illusions, and shaking the serpents with which it is environed, would convert

their hearts into stone. Let me for ever remain defenceless, a butt to every consolatory falsehood and pleasant cheat, rather than be armed with the fatal spear of Ithuriel. Rather would I hold with the wily Gaul, that speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts, than have his tongue betray all the secrets of his bosom, unless we could approximate his nature nearer to the angelic. I do not acknowledge Truth to be more my friend than Plato; it is because she is great, and in some respects as terrible as great, that I wish her not to prevail. Away, then, ye croaking forethoughts and foresights, that would pour your dark bodings in our ear, and make us think unfavourably, although, perchance, too truly, of our species! Avaunt! ye ravens, who would tell us that love is a dream, and friendship a romance; that all the glittering joys of life are splendid lies, while all its miseries are dark realities! Keep your pestilent and gloomy wisdom to yourselves, and leave us to our happy ignorance. Tell us not that the distrustfulness of age will quickly dissipate our flattering visions; reprobating, with Fontaine, "cette philosophie rigide qui fait cesser de vivre avant que l'on soit mort," let us cling, even in second childhood, to the pleasant delusions of our first, and continue to be dupes, rather than finish by being misanthropes. It is better to know nothing than to know too much. In the beginning of the world, the knowledge of the tree of good and evil was accompanied with death: so it is still, with death to the soul, with extinction to the heart. Taking the scriptural fact either literally or allegorically, let us profit by its lesson.

THE CULPRIT AND THE JUDGE.

THE realm of France possess'd, in days of old, A thriving set of literati,

Or men of letters, turning all to gold:

The standard works they made less weighty By new abridgments-took abundant Pains their roughnesses to polish, And plied their scissars to abolish The superficial and redundant; And yet, instead of fame and praise, Hogsheads of sack, and wreaths of bays, The law, in those benighted ages, By barbarous edicts did enjoin, That they should cease their occupation, Terming these literary sages Clippers and filers of the coin:

(Oh, what a monstrous profanation!)

Nay, what was deeper to be dreaded,

These worthies were, when caught, beheaded!

But to the point. A story should

Be like a coin-a head and tail In a few words enveloped. Good! I must not let the likeness fail.

A Gascon, who had long pursued
This trade of clipping,

And filing the similitude

Of good King Pepin,

Was caught by the police, who found him

With file and scissars in his hand,

And ounces of Pactolian sand

Lying around him.

The case admitting no denial,
They hurried him forthwith to trial;
When the Judge made a long oration
About the crime and profanation,
And gave no respite for repentance,
But instantly pronounced his sentence→
"Decapitation!"

"As to offending Powers divine,"
The culprit cried, "be nothing said-
Your's is a deeper guilt than mine:
I took a portion from the head

Of the king's image; you, oh, fearful odds!
Strike the whole head at once from God's!"

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MY TEA-KETTLE.

"O madness to think use of strongest wines, And strongest drinks, our chief support of health." MILTON.

A CERTAIN popular writer who is wasting his time and misemploying his formidable pen in vituperating that most innocent and ingratiating of all beverages, 'Tea, should be condemned, for at least six months, to drink from a slop-basin the washing of a washerwoman's Bohea; or be blown up with some of Twining's best Gunpowder: or be doomed to exemplify one of Pope's victims of spleen, and

"A living tea-pot stand, one arm held out,

One bent; the handle this, and that the spout."

His cottage economy may be very accurate in its calculations: I dispute not his agrestical or bucolic lore; but why should this twitter of Twankay presume to denounce it as insalubrious, or brand its frugal infusions with riot and unthrift? Is Sir John Barleycorn, after the brewer's chymist has " drugged our possets;" or "Blue Ruin," with all its juniper seductions; or Roman Purl, still more indigestible than Cleopatra's,—to leave no alternative of tipple to the thirsty cottager? Is he to have no scruples for drams, and yet to be squeamish and fastidious about a watery decoction, to play the anchorite about a cup of tea? Sobriety and temperance are not such besetting virtues among our lower orders, that we can afford to narrow their influence by circumscribing the use of this antidote against drunkenness; and the champion of the brewers should recollect the dictum of Raynal-that tea has contributed more to sobriety than the severest laws, the most eloquent harangues of Christian orators, or the best treatises of morality. But we have within our realm five hundred as good as he, who have done full justice to the virtues of this calumniated plant. Dr. Johnson, as Mrs. Thrale knew to her cost, was an almost insatiable tea-bibber, and praised that salutiferous potation with as much cordiality as he drank it.

Bontikoe, a Dutch physician, considers it a universal panacea; and after bestowing the most extravagant encomiums upon it, declares that two hundred cups may be drank in a day with great benefit. The learned Grusterzippius, a German commentator, is of opinion