says, 'Please to walk in, sir.' That I shall never be paid for my labour according to the current value of time and labour, is tolerably certain; but if any one should offer me £10,000 to forego that labour, I should bid him and his money go to the devil, for twice the sum could not purchase me half the enjoyment."

FUGITIVE VERSES.

It is on such scraps that witlings feed; and it is hard that the world should judge of our housekeeping from what we fling to the dogs.-Pope to Swift.

DIRTY HANDS.

Charles Lamb once said to a brother whistplayer, Martin Burney, whose hands were none of the cleanest, "Martin, if dirt was trumps what a hand you'd have."

MONTAIGNE'S PLAGIARISMS.

Old Montaigne somewhere in his writings informs us of an ingenious plan of his, of transferring whole sentences from ancient authors, without acknowledg ment, that the critics might blunder, by giving nazardes to Seneca and Plutarch, while they imagined they tweaked his nose.

SLEEPING IN CHURCH.

Query, (demands Swift,) whether churches are not dormitories of the living as well as the dead?

ROUSSEAU AND MADAME D'EPINAY.

Their friendship so formed, proceeded to a great degree of intimacy. Madame d'Epinay admired hist genius, and provided him with hats and coats; and, at last, was so far deluded by his declamations about the country, as to fit him up a little hermit cottage, where there were a great many birds, and a great many plants and flowers-and where Rousseau was, as might have heen expected, supremely miserable. His friends from Paris did not come to see him. The postman, the butcher, and the baker, hate romantic scenery; duchesses and marchionesses were no longer found to scramble for him. Among the real inhabitants of the country, the reputation of reading and thinking is fatal to character; and Jean Jacques cursed his own successful eloquence which had sent him from the suppers and flattery of Paris to smell to daffodils, watch sparrows, or project idle saliva into the passing stream.-Sydney Smith.

COLERIDGE AND THE JEWS.

I have had a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money of them. The other day I was what you call floored by a Jew. He passed me several times, crying for old clothes in a most nasal and extraordinary tone I ever heard. At last, I was so provoked that I said to him: "Pray, why can't you say 'old clothes' in a plain way, as I do now?" The Jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me said, in a

clear and even fine accent, "Sir, I can say 'old clothes' as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say 'ogh clo,' as I do now;" and so he marched off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.

Once I sat in a coach opposite a Jew; a symbol of old clothes-bags; an Isaiah of Holywell-street. He would close the window; I opened it. He closed it again; upon which, in a very solemn tone, I said to him: "Son of Abraham! thou smellest; son of Isaac! thou art offensive; son of Jacob! thou stinkest foully. See the man in the moon! he is holding his nose at that distance; dost thou think that I, sitting here, can endure it any longer?" My Jew was astounded, opened the window forthwith himself, and said, "he was sorry he did not know before, I was so great a gentleman."-Coleridge's Table-Talk.

A LOVE OF LITERATURE.

Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hand a most perverse selection of books.

You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history,-with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him.-Sir John Herschel.

CHARITY OF A MISER.

An illiterate person, who always volunteered to "go round with the hat," but was suspected of sparing his own pocket, overhearing once a hint to that effect, replied: "Other gentlemen puts down what they thinks proper, and so do I. Charity's a private concern, and what I give is nothing to nobody.” -Hood.

GOOD ACTIONS.

The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. -Charles Lamb.

RETIRING TO THE COUNTRY.

Very few men who have gratified, and are gratifying their vanity in a great metropolis, are qualified to quit it. Few have the plain sense to perceive that they must soon inevitably be forgotten-or the fortitude to bear it when they are. They represent to themselves imaginary scenes of deploring friends and

dispirited companies-but the ocean might as well regret the drops exhaled by the sunbeams. Life goes on; and whether the absent have retired into a cottage or a grave, is much the same thing. In London as in law, de non apparentibus, et non existentibus eadem est ratio.-Sydney Smith.

SELFISHNESS.

There are persons who have so far outgrown their catechism, as to believe that their only duty is to themselves.-The Doctor.

LORD NORTH.

Lord North's wit appears to have been of a kind peculiarly characteristic and eminently natural; playing easily and without the least effort; perfectly suited to his placid nature, by being what Lord Clarendon says of Charles II., "a pleasant, affable, recommending sort of wit;" wholly unpretending; and so exquisitely suited to the occasion that it never failed of effect, yet so readily produced and so entirely unambitious, that although it had occurred to nobody before, every one wondered it had not suggested itself to all. A few only of his sayings have reached us, and these, as might be expected, are rather things which he had chanced to coat over with some sarcasm or epigram that tended to preserve them; they consequently are far from giving an idea of his habitual pleasantry, and the gayety of thought which generally pervaded his