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familiar "count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram," in one of Mr. Dickens' later stories is but another practical application of the selfsame text.

Gibbon adds to his account of the public penance inflicted by Ambrose on Theodosius, for the massacre of Thessalonica, this remark: "and the edict which interposes a salutary interval of thirty days between the sentence and the execution, may be accepted as the worthy fruits of his [the emperor's] repentance." For it was by a hasty resolve that Theodosius swore in his wrath to expiate the blood of his lieutenant, Botheric, by the blood of a guilty people; his fiery and choleric temper being impatient of the dilatory forms of a judicial inquiry. In hot haste he despatched the messengers of death; but attempted, when it was too late, to prevent the execution of his own orders. Avenging furiously in haste, he had to repent at leisure; and he did repent.

It is impossible, perhaps, observed Dean Swift, for the best and wisest among us to keep so constant a guard upon our temper but that we may at some time or other lie open to the strokes of fortune. Incensed on one occasion, "it was natural for me to have immediate recourse to my pen and ink; but before I would offer to make use of them, I resolved deliberately to tell over a hundred; and when I came to the end of that sum, I found it more advisable to defer drawing up my intended remonstrance till I had slept soundly on my resentments." We are told of the celebrated Macklin, that although so particular in drilling the performers at rehearsals, he was scrupulous in keeping his temper down, the irritability of which he knew too well; and that on one occasion he interposed an hour by his stop-watch, all retiring together from the stage to the green-room, at the end of which time all were in good humour again, and the rehearsal was resumed. "When the evil effects of hasty anger approach, the consequences of which may be irretrievable,”—thus moralizes a fellow-craftsman, John O'Keeffe," it would be no harm if all of us could suppress our own feelings, even for Macklin's green-room hour." His mighty master, Shakspeare, would have supplied him with a

precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,―

"Now, lords, my choler being overblown
With walking once about the quadrangle,
I come to talk of commonwealth affairs."

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton's secretary, Mr. Nixon, on his own showing, could not refrain from blurting out just what he felt at the moment, when differences arose between the two. This used to vex Sir Thomas, who however would say nothing till the next day, and then, when the secretary thought that the whole matter had passed off (having perhaps received great kindness in the meantime), the remonstrance would come out, "What a silly fellow you were, Nixon, to put yourself in such a passion yesterday! If I had spoken then, we should most probably have parted. Make it a rule never to speak when you are in a passion, but wait till the next day."

And we are

assured that, if at any time he happened to transgress this rule himself, he was seriously vexed and grieved, and could not rest till he had in some way made amends for his want of selfrestraint.

Molière's Arnolphe propounds the prophylactic rule with emphasis and discretion:

"Un certain Grec disait à l'empereur Auguste,
Comme une instruction utile autant que juste,
Que lorsqu'une aventure en colère nous met,
Nous devons, avant tout, dire notre alphabet,
Afin que dans ce temps la bile se tempère,

Et qu'on ne fasse rien que l'on ne doive faire."

B

EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW.

HOSEA vi. 3.

Y the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell on Ephraim and on Judah, that their goodness was as a

morning cloud, and that as the early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words of Dante :

The will in man

Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise
Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain,
Made mere abortion: faith and innocence

Are met with but in babes; each taking leave
Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled."

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Adam Smith observes, in his "Theory of Moral Sentiment," that, in the eye of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy. It ought to do so," he adds. "Everything may be expected, or at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be either expected or hoped from the old man." It is regretful, remorseful eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,

"O little souls! as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light

Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,

How red my setting sun appears,

How lurid looks this soul of mine!"

Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the "Pleasures of Memory," and with direct reference to that poem, "In looking back, the only days I earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was 'girt with growing infancy,' and read in the eyes and the smiles of my children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness, such as this world can never fulfil." A more vigorous poet than Samuel Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of young motherhood, when the wife

"Blest into mother, in the innocent look,

Or even the piping cry of lips that brook

No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives

Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook

She sees her little bud put forth its leaves

What may the fruits be yet?—I know not-Cain was Eve's." The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell's story hails in her child a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. "And her mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children."

Juvenal asks, "what morn's so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy, and fraud." The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child : dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting in its refreshing redolence of promise-" qui ne nous fait que des promesses." Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second birthday :

"Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour,

Sweet is the sun's first radiance, sweet the year,
In the spring's early promise, sweet the flower,
Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear-

But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me

Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind,
That beams with new quick thoughts, yet undefined,

That tell of what is now and what may be.

O may the God who taught us that, like thee,

We should be pure and spotless, bless thee still;

Lay on thy infant head His hand, to free

Thine heart from sin, and form thee to His will,
Cleanse thee from aught that's evil or defiled,

And keep thee as thou art, my darling child."

George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach-impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had

been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it "chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining." Elia, the essay writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that "other me," there, in the background, he must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master-with as little reference, he protests, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not his father's son. "I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!"

Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory faces in the dame school :

"Even now sagacious foresight points to show

A little bench of heedless bishops here,

And there a chancellor in embryo,

Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so,

As Milton, Shakspeare, names that ne'er shall die!"

So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie's lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood :—

"Ah! many a lightly sportive child,
Who hath like thee our wits beguiled,
To dull and sober manhood grown,
With strange recoil our hearts disown."

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