reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages;' or Garrick's remark, when a bad farce called 'Fire and Water' was offered him: 'I know what will be the fate of this piece when acted; for what can fire and water produce but a hiss?' Again, Milton's bitter taunt that 'James the First had at least one claim to the title of Solomon, that he was the son of David,' is an epigram; and also Lord John Russell's opinion of an Agricultural Jury, that they are men whose intellects are as muddy as their roads, and their wills far more obstinate than those of the brutes they drive.' Macaulay's description of Bishop Atterbury's defence of the Letters of Phalaris, as the very best book ever written on the wrong side of a question, of both sides of which the writer was profoundly ignorant;' and Disraeli's remark when he wrote on the Duke of Newcastle, 'The house of Pelham has been distinguished for the last century by an incapacity for statesmanship, and a genius for jobbing;' and Jekyll's of a brewer drowned in his own vat, ' unwept he floats upon his watery bier;' are good pointed epigrams. Sayings of this kind too : Chastity is the honesty of women, and honesty is the chastity of men ;' 'She lived happily with her hus

band from that time to his death, which happened shortly after;' 'My left hand knows not what my right hand gives.' 'Possibly not, for your right hand gives nothing;' 'Women in possession of every thing to gratify reasonable desires, are apt to sigh for straws ;''There are no persons so solicitous about the preservation of rank, as those who have no rank at all;' 'A card-leaving ceremony is merely a deposit of crocodile's eggs;''If we are not to oblige one another, life becomes a paltry selfish affair—a pitiful morsel in a corner' -are true epigrams. These, with ten thousand other similar saws which may be culled from the prose writings of Bacon, Barrow, Pope, Byron, Seneca, Tacitus, Boethius, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Lamb, and numberless other eminent authors, need only to be tricked out in verse to be acknowledged as genuine epigrams. Again, it is no unusual thing to meet with epigrams within a poem which, in itself, is not one; as, for example, in Rochester's reply to Scrope the last four lines are a real epigram :

'Half-witty, and half-mad, and scarce half-brave, Half-honest (which is very much a knave) : Made up of all these halves, thou canst not pass For anything entirely but an ass.'

In that justly famous and imperishable production, Hudibras, Butler, in exposing the cant and hypocrisy of the men of his time and their deeds, has combined a series of epigrams, 'each funnier, absurder, and more pointed than the rest.' It would be an easy task to extract from Dryden's greatest poems, Absalom and Achitophel and the Hind and Panther, 'distichs and quatrains which are perfect epigrams; and what are the last seventy lines of the first of Pope's Moral Epistles but a string of epigrams on that abandoned profligate, Philip, Duke of Wharton, and other well-known characters of the day? So, too, there may be detached from the comic ballads of that greatest of punsters, Hood, verses which are verily neither more or less than epigrams. Take the two following:

'That picture-raffles will conduce to nourish
Design, or cause good colouring to flourish,
Admits of logic-chopping and wise sawing;
But surely lotteries encourage drawing.'

'A mechanic his labour will discard,

If the rate of his pay he dislikes :

But a clock-and its case is uncommonly hard-
Will continue to work though it strikes.'

It has been well and justly said, in the teeth of

the railing accusations nowadays blurted forth by the ignobile vulgus' against the study of the Classics, that the man who devotes himself to English literature without the lights of classical learning loses half the charms of its sentiments and style, of its force and feelings, of its delicate touches, of its delightful allusions and illustrative associations.

Who that meditates over the strains of Milton does not feel that his magnificent mind was lighted by coals from ancient altars? Who that reads the poetry of Gray does not feel that it is the refinement of classical taste which gives such inexpressible vividness and transparency to his diction? What student of Dryden and Pope does not recognise in them the disciples of a school, whose genius was inflamed by the heroic verse, the terse satire, and the playful wit of antiquity? It is, then, but telling the bare truth when we affirm that many finished and perfected conceits, many charming sententious passages in Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Shakspeare, and others of our noble writers are, in fact, but a reproduction in another form and polish of rich gems acquired, consciously or unconsciously, from ancient treasure-houses, ever and anon recalling to the mind their Greek and Latin parallels.

a

No one can doubt that the epigram may be turned to an admirable use in correcting offences against good sense and good manners, by ridiculing vanity, pride, arrogance, impertinence, affectation, or vulgarity of behaviour; but it has altogether passed its legitimate bounds, when its satire or point is aimed at natural defects, or at anything that is stamped with the Divine approval.

The collection of epigrams now offered to the public consists of translations of a select few from the Greek Anthology and from Latin authors, ancient and modern. English versions of German, French, Spanish, Italian, and other continental authors who have indulged their fancies in such witty conceits, have received the attention they justly merited, and from such sources many have been included in the work. It also embraces a great number of those which were written by our own eminent poets who, though not devoting much of their time to this kind of writing, still amused and occupied themselves occasionally with such compositions, seemingly suggested by some passing event, or some eccentric personage, who may, perhaps, have caused offence, or given rise to merry thoughts. Selections have been made from periodical and ephemeral publications of the olden time,' or of