other-then a fourth. At this period Julia appeared at the door, and beckoned upon the landlord, who arose from the table, saying he would rejoin us immediately. Mr. Tims and I were thus left alone, and so we continued, for the landlord-strange to say-did not again appear. What became of him I know not. I supposed he had gone to bed, and left his great friend and myself to pass the time as we were best able.

We were now commencing our fifth tumbler, and I began to feel my whole spirit pervaded by the most delightful sensations. My heart beat quicker, my head sat more lightly than usual upon my shoulders; and sounds like the distant hum of bees, or the music of the spheres, heard in echo afar off, floated around me. There was no bar between me and perfect happiness, but the Man-Mountain, who sat on the great elbow-chair opposite, drinking his brandy-toddy, and occasionally humming an old song with the utmost indifference.

It was plain that he despised me. While any of the others were present he was abundantly loquacious, but now he was as dumb as a fish-tippling in silence, and answering such questions as I put to him in abrupt monosyllables. The thing was intolerable, but I saw into it: Julia had played me false; the "Mountain" was the man of her choice, and I his despised and contemptible rival.

wildered eyes of Gulliver. At last he resumed his human shape, and sat before me like "Andes, giant of the Western Star,"-tippling the jorum, and sighing deeply.

Yes, he sighed profoundly, passionately, tenderly; and the sighs came from his breast like blasts of wind from the cavern of Eolus. By Jove, he was in love; in love with Julia! and I thought it high time to probe him to the quick.

"Sir," said I, "you must be conscious that you have no right to love Julia. You have no right to put your immense body between her and me. She is my betrothed bride, and mine she shall be forever."

"I have weighty reasons for loving her," replied Mr. Tims.

"Were your reasons as weighty as your person, you shall not love her."

"She shall be mine," responded he, with a deeply-drawn sigh. "You cannot, at least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: I cannot deem thee dead-like the perfumes Arising from Judea's vanished shrines Thy voice still floats around me-nor can A thousand, from my memory hide the lines

tombs

Of beauty, on thine aspect which abode,
Like streaks of sunshine pictured there by
God.

She shall be mine," continued he in the same strain. "Prose and verse shall woo her for my lady-love; and she shall blush and hang her head in modest joy, even as the rose when listening to the music of her beloved bulbul beneath the stars of night."

amazed at my courage: I was amazed at it myself; but what will not love, inspired by brandy, effect?

"No," continued I, seeing the impression my words had produced upon him, "I despise thee, and defy thee, even as Hercules did Antæus, as Sampson did Harapha, as Orlando did Ferragus. Bulk without spirit vast,' I fear thee not-come on." So saying, I rushed onward to the Mountain, who arose from his seat to receive me. The following passage from the Agonistes of Milton will give

some idea of our encounter :

"As with the force of winds and waters pent, When mountains tremble, these two massy pillars, With horrible convulsion to and fro,

He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder,
drew
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath."

"Psha!" said Julia, blushing modestly, "can't you let me go?"Sweet Julia! I had got her in my

arms.

"But where," said I, "is Mr. Tims?"

"Mr. Who?" said she.
"The Man-Mountain."

"Mr. Tims !-Man-Mountain !"resumed Julia, with unfeigned surprise. "I know of no such persons. How jocular you are to-night-not to say how ill-bred, for you have been asleep for the last five minutes !" "Sweet-sweet Julia !"

IT has been somewhere asserted, that "no one is idle who can do anything. It is conscious inability, or the sense of repeated failures, that prevents us from undertaking, or deters us from the prosecution of any work." In answer to this it may be said, that men of very great natural genius are in general exempt from a love of idleness, because, being pushed forward, as it were, and excited to action by that vis vivida, which is continually stirring within them, the first effort, the original impetus, proceeds not altogether from their own voluntary exertion, and because the pleasure which they, above all others, experience in the exercise of their faculties, is an ample compensation for the labor which that exercise requires. Accordingly, we find that the best writers of every age have generally, though not always, been the most voluminous. Not to mention a host of ancients, I might instance many of our own country as illustrious examples of this assertion, and no example more illustrious than that of the immortal Shakspeare. In our times the author of "Waverley," whose productions, in different branches of literature, would almost of themselves fill a li

brary, continues to pour forth volume after volume from his inexhaustible stores. Mr. Southey, too, the poet, the historian, the biographer, and I know not what besides, is remarkable for his literary industry; and last, not least, the noble bard, the glory and the regret of every one who has a soul to feel those " thoughts that breathe and words that burn," the mighty poet himself, notwithstanding the shortness of his life, is distinguish ed by the number, as well as by the beauty and sublimity of his works. Besides these and other male writers, the best of our female authors, the boast and delight of the present age, and who have been compared to "so many modern Muses"-Miss Landon, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, &c.-have they not already supplied us largely with the means of entertainment and instruction, and have we not reason to expect still greater supplies from the same sources?

But although it may be easily allowed that men of very great natural genius are for the most part exempt from a love of idleness, it ought also to be acknowledged that there are others to whom, indeed, nature has not been equally bountiful, but who possess a

certain degree of talent which perse verance and study (if to study they would apply themselves) might gradually advance, and at last carry to excellence.

With the exception of a few master spirits of every age and nation, genius is more equally distributed among mankind than many suppose. Hear what Quintilian says on the subject; his observations are these :-" It is a groundless complaint, that very few are endowed with quick apprehension, and that most persons lose the fruits of all their application and study through a natural slowness of understanding. The case is the very reverse, because we find mankind in general to be quick in apprehension, and susceptible of instruction, this being the characteristic of the human

race; and as birds have from nature a propensity to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to be savage, so is activity and vigor of mind peculiar to man; and hence his mind is supposed to be of divine original. But men are no more born with minds naturally dull and indocile, than with bodies of monstrous shapes, and these are very rare."

From what has been premised, this conclusion may be drawn—that it is not "conscious inability” alone, but often a love of leisure, which prevents us from undertaking any work. Many, to whom nature had given a certain degree of genius, have lived without sufficiently exercising that genius, and have, therefore, bequeathed no fruits of it to posterity at their death.

THE French pulpit orators of the age of Louis XIV. are the only considerable body of modern rhetoricians out of the English language. No writers are more uniformly praised; none are more entirely neglected. This is one of those numerous hypocrisies so common in matters of taste, where the critic is always ready with his good word, as the readiest way of getting rid of the subject. To blame might be hazardous; for blame demands reasons; but praise enjoys a ready dispensation from all reasons and from all discrimination. Superstition, however, as it is, under which the French rhetoricians hold their reputation, we have no thought of attempting any disturbance to it in so slight and incidental a notice as this. Let critics by all means continue to invest them with every kind of imaginary splendor. Meantime let us suggest, as a judicious caution, that French rhetoric should be praised with a reference only to its own narrow standard for it would be a most unfortunate trial of its pretensions, to bring so meagre a style of composi

tion into a close comparison with the gorgeous opulence of the English rhetoric of the same century. Under such a comparison, two capital points of weakness would force themselves upon the least observant of criticsfirst, the defect of striking imagery; and, secondly, the slenderness of the thoughts. The rhetorical manner is supported in the French writers chiefly by an abundance of ohs and ahs— by interrogatories-apostrophes-and startling exclamations: all which are mere mechanical devices for raising the style: but in the substance of the composition, apart from its dress, there is nothing properly rhetorical. The leading thoughts in all pulpit eloquence being derived from religion, and, in fact, the common inheritance of human nature,-if they cannot be novel, for that very reason cannot be undignified: but, for the same reason, they are apt to become unaffecting and trite, unless varied and individualized by new infusions of thought and feeling. The smooth monotony of the leading religious topics, as managed by the French orators, under the treat

ment of Jeremy Taylor receives at each turn of the sentence a new flexure or what may be called a separate articulation:* old thoughts are surveyed from novel stations and under various angles and a field absolutely exhausted throws up eternally fresh verdure under the fructifying lava of burning imagery. Human life, for example, is short-human happiness is frail: how trite, how obvious a thesis! Yet, in the beginning of the Holy Dying, upon that simplest of themes how magnificent a descant! Variations the most original upon a ground the most universal, and a sense of novelty diffused over truths coeval with human life! Finally, it may be remarked of the imagery in the French rhetoric, that it is thinly sown, common-place, deficient in splendor, and, above all, merely ornamental; that is to say, it does no more than echo and repeat what is already said in the thought which it is brought to illustrate; whereas, in Jeremy Taylor, and in Burke, it will be found usually to extend and amplify the thought, or to fortify it by some indirect argument of its truth. Thus, for instance, in a passage of J. Taylor, upon the insensibility of man to the continual mercies of God, at first view the mind is staggered by the apparent impossibility that so infinite a reality, and of so continual a recurrence, should escape our notice; but the illustrative image, drawn from the case of a man standing at the bottom of the ocean, and yet insensible to that world of waters

above him, from the uniformity and equality of its pressure, flashes upon us with a sense of something equally marvellous, in a case which we know to be a physical fact. We are thus reconciled to the proposition, by the same image which illustrates it.

Since the time we have referred to, the very same developement of science and public business, operated in France and in England, to stifle the rhetorical impulses, and all those analogous tendencies in arts and in manners which support it. Generally it may be assumed that rhetoric will not survive the age of the ceremonious in manners, and the gorgeous in costume. An unconscious sympathy binds together the various forms of the elaborate and the fanciful, under every manifestation. Hence it is that the national convulsions by which modern France has been shaken, produced orators, Mirabeau, Isnard, the Abbé Maury, but no rhetoricians. Florian, Chateaubriand, and others, who have written the most florid prose that the modern taste can bear, are elegant sentimentalists, sometimes maudlin and semi-poetic, sometimes even eloquent, but never rhetorical. There is no eddying about their own thoughts; no motion of fancy self-sustained from its own activities; no flux and reflux of thought, half meditative, half capricious; but strains of feeling, genuine or not, supported at every step from the excitement of independent external objects.

In a single mechanical quality of

good writing, that is, in the structure of their sentences, the French rhetoricians, in common with French writers generally of that age, are superior to ours. In the age of our great rhetoricians, it is remarkable that the English language had never been made an object of conscious attention. No man seems to have reflected that there was a wrong and a right in the choice of words-in the choice of phrasesin the mechanism of sentences-or even in the grammar. Men wrote eloquently, because they wrote feelingly they wrote idiomatically, because they wrote naturally, and without affectation: but if a false or acephalous structure of sentence,-if a barbarous idiom-or an exotic word happened to present itself, no writer of the 17th century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense of the dignity belonging to his own language, as should make it a duty to reject it, or worth his while to re-model a line. The fact is, that verbal criticism had

not as yet been very extensively applied even to the classical languages: the Scaligers, Casaubon, and Salmasius, were much more critics on things than critics philologically. However, even in that age, the French writers were more attentive to the cultivation of their mother tongue, than any other people. It is justly remarked by Schlegel, that the most worthless writers among the French, as to matter, generally take pains with their diction; or perhaps it is more true to say, that with equal pains, in their language it is more easy to write well than in one of greater compass. It is also true, that the French are indebted for their greater purity from foreign idioms, to their much more limited acquaintance with foreign literature. Still, with every deduction from the merit, the fact is as we have said; and it is apparent, not only by innumerable evidences in the concrete, but by the superiority of all their abstract auxiliaries in the art of writing.