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than King Solomon's, in the matter of putting a knife to one's throat, if edacious and a diner-out :

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"Look to thy mouth : diseases enter there...

Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.
Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit;
Then say withal, Earth to earth I commit."

HAZAEL'S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF.

WHY

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.

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,

Que de vouloir jurer qu'on ne le sera pas."

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,
Will end the deed in blood: 'twas so with him;
He once possessed a soul quick as your own
To mercy, and would quake, as you do now,
At the bare apprehension of the act

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.

66

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

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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

only the modest reserve and self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes less regard for others,

and the cover is taken off.

A clerical essayist on

"Future Years," 99 66 can well believe," he tells us, 66 that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to that!" "Mansie Wauch's glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame." And it would be no comfort, we are reminded-it would be an aggravation in that view-to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it-that being the worst of all.

Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if you will-the hue of blood-a degraded instance of the degrading power of guilt—a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse, or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects,—

"Till creatures born,

For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed)
Will act the direst crimes they cursed
But yester-morn."

THE OPEN RIGHT HAND'S SECRET FROM THE

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LEFT.

ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.

O some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." The atmosphere is of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret, as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand the furtive bounties and stealthy

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