his dining at a Roman palace, and his own fears lest, from the hospitality of the Torlonia family, and "with servants on all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome," Sir Walter might be induced to eat more than was safe for his malady. "Colonel Blair, who sat next him, was requested to take care that this should not happen. Whenever I observed him, however, Sir Walter appeared always to be eating; while the duchess, who had discovered the nature of the office imposed on the colonel, was by no means satisfied, and after dinner observed that it was an odd sort of friendship which consisted in starving one's neighbour to death, when he had a good appetite, and there was dinner enough." The selfish club-man par excellence has been depicted as earthing himself from pursuit in the sanctuary of his club, there to eat his fill unmolested, with no remonstrant at hand to remind him of the gout when enjoying his turtle, or to talk of cupping when the glass of champagne is at his lips. "There he may eat his asparagus tout à l'huile—there he may pepper his cream-tart," and none to say him nay. Drawn with pitiless realism from the life is Acton Bell (Anne Bronte)'s picture of the dying master of Wildfell Hall, whose extreme dread of death, when and while it seems imminent, renders easy his wife's task of curbing his unruly greed, but who becomes intractable as the danger to dear life seems receding. "I watch and restrain him," she writes, " as well as I can, and often get bitterly abused for my rigid severity; and sometimes he contrives to elude my vigilance, and sometimes acts in opposition to my will." William Collins, the painter, notes in his diary a certain "dinner at C―'s," where he "sat next to H-——, who took some highly seasoned omelet. I asked him how he could venture on such stuff; he said he could not resist it, though he knew how much he should suffer from it. He took a great deal of wine, to overcome the effects of the omelet, and assured me he should be ill for four days after such a dinner, and that he always suffered in the same way after dining with C— ! How absurd such weakness appears, and yet how common it is!" George Herbert's counsel is never out of date, any more than King Solomon's, in the matter of putting a knife to one's throat, if edacious and a diner-out :— "Look to thy mouth : diseases enter there. Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear. HAZAEL'S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF. W 2 KINGS viii. 13. HY wept Elisha in the presence of Hazael, when that envoy from the sick king of Syria courted the man of God, in his sovereign's behalf, with a consignment of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels' burden? Courteous and gentle was Benhadad's messenger who came to inquire of the Lord of Elisha, if the royal Syrian should recover of the disease which had brought him so low. Why wept the prophet, when his prophecy had been uttered, ominously vague? "Go, say unto him [Benhadad], Thou mayest certainly recover. Howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall certainly die." And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was ashamed. "And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children," etc. And Hazael said, "But what! is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?" Yet Hazael went home, and on the very morrow commenced his justification of the seer's previsionary tears, by spreading a thick wet cloth on the face of his master, so that Benhadad, who else would have recovered, died, and Hazael reigned in his stead. Well might the man of God weep, nor could anything be more natural, or at least naturally assumed, than the shuddering repudiation, the deprecating protest, of the envoy that now was, the king-and dog-that to-morrow should be. "Lui-même, à son portrait forcé de rendre hommage, Il frémira d'horreur devant sa propre image." The man who is weak, observes Miss Lee in the "Canterbury Tales," is always in danger of becoming a villain; and she exemplifies this liability in the instance of Villars, who, by indulging a passion calculated to enfeeble his understanding and corrupt his heart, is soon to be found touching that point which his high tone of romantic refinement had once induced him to believe it impossible he should even approach. But he protests too much who strenuously protests, with protestation heaped on protestation, against any such possible lapse and collapse on his part; and there are cases of this kind, of which one may say with Molière Que c'est être à demi ce que l'on vient de dire, Martial is in the right in answering the inquiry of Priscus, how would he live if he became rich and great all at once, with another query, Who can say beforehand what his future conduct will be? Quemquam posse putas mores narrare futuros? If Priscus were to become a lion, what sort of one would he turn out to be? Perhaps like Hazael, a dog. In sight of a corpse suspended to a tree, the "miserable remnant of a wretch that was hanged there for murder," Robert, in one of Tobin's dramas, protests to his mother that, robber though he be, he is no murderer; she replies: "You are a robber; And he who robs, by sharp resistance pressed, That has consigned him to yon blasted tree." Dr. Hamilton somewhere adverts to a sort of gambling in our large cities which does not look particularly repulsive-not being carried on in "hells," and pleading the sanction of some titled names; the results, however, of which are hanging like a millstone round the neck of many a once promising young man ; while, to say nothing of those whom it has reduced to beggary or blackguardism, numbers of its victims must be sought in the Portland hulks or Dartmoor prison. "They went to the racecourse, or, without going there, they laid wagers on horses, and sooner or later they lost more than they could pay, and in dread of dishonour they took means to get the money at the very suggestion of which, once upon a time, they would indignantly have exclaimed, 'Is thy servant a dog?' and after a few miserable makeshifts, only adding sin to sin, there came detection and ruin and disgrace." It is of the riotous living of prodigal sons that the same preacher is treating, when he shows, in his graphic way, how speedily riot, whether coarse or refined, wastes the reveller's substance-not only sapping the constitution, and softening the brain, and shattering the nerves, and enfeebling the mind, but exhausting the estate, and soon bringing the spendthrift to poverty. And, as the discourser goes on to say, if the passion still urges, and the fear of God has departed, wild methods will be used to meet the demand and assuage the frantic craving. "Keepsakes will be sold or pledged, to part with which would, once upon a time, have looked like sacrilege." Perhaps money will be taken from the till, and so on and on, or rather downwards and downwards, deeper and deeper, till the lowest deep is sounded, and darkness is the burier of the dead. It has been remarked by one of the most reflective of our popular authors, that there is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change, for this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. "The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all S things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike." Europe, it is suggestively added, adjusts itself to a fait accompli; and so does an individual character-until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution. Recording the appointment of Bonaparte to succeed Scherer in command of the French forces on Genoese territory, Southey observes that although the former had given indications of his military talents at Toulon, and of his remorseless nature at Paris, "the extent either of his ability or his wickedness was at this time known to none, and perhaps not even suspected by himself." Of all the lessons derived from the history of human passion, says Lavalette, the most important is the utter impossibility which even the best men will always experience of stopping, if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they were perpetrated, the crimes of the first French Revolution, he goes on to surmise, could have been portrayed to those who committed them, "even Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror." Men, in the case suggested, are seduced at first by plausible theories, which their heated imaginations represent as beneficial and easy of execution: "they advance unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till sensibility is destroyed by the habitual spectacle of guilt, and the most savage atrocities come to be dignified by the name of state policy." The world, and the spirit of the world, observes Sir Fowell Buxton in one of his letters, are very insidious; "and more than once I have seen a person who, as a youth, was single-eyed and single-hearted, and who, to any one who supposed he might glide into laxity of zeal, would have said, 'Am I a dog?' in maturer age become, if not a lover of the vices of the world, at least a tolerator of its vanities." But as M. de Sainte-Beuve sententiously puts it, in one of his maxims after the manner of La Rochefoucauld, "La plupart des défauts qui éclatent dans la seconde moitié de la vie existaient en nous tout formés bien auparavant; mais ils étaient masqués, en quelque sorte, par la pudeur de la jeunesse." The faults of after-life were there, and |