rarely, if ever, intended to be profitable to the hearer. An insult or an impertinence comes from an enemy, but those disagreeable things which are frequently uttered in the operation of speaking the mind are almost always barbed shafts from the bow of one who calls himself a friend." Now, as wisdom suggests, even if disagreeable things are true, that alone is not the slightest reason for saying them. Shakspeare hits off a variety of examples of the class who like to speak their mind. Honest Kent, whose avowed occupation it is to be plain, is misconstrued into a perverse specimen by an unfriendly critic: Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect Quite from his nature: he cannot flatter, he !- An they will take it, so; if not, he's plain. These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Than twenty silly ducking observants, That stretch their duties nicely." Jaques is professedly one who must have liberty, as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom he pleases. Give him leave to speak his mind, and he will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world, if they will patiently receive his medicine. A parlous if. Of a kindlier stock comes that outspoken old patrician, Menenius Agrippa, whose "heart's in 's mouth: what his breast forges, that his tongue must vent." Here, on the other hand, is the shrew proper : "Your betters have endured me say my mind ; And if you cannot, best to stop your ears. Even to the uttermost, as I please in words." That is Katharina of Padua. And here loquitur another shrewish tongue, Sicilian Paulina's : "He must be told on 't, and he shall: the office The trumpet any more." She'll use that tongue she has to the king: if wit flow from it, as boldness from her bosom, let it not be doubted she 'll do some good. But the king is only exasperated by her unreserved utterances, and turns on her husband as a fellow worthy to be hanged, for not stopping her tongue. "Hang all the husbands that cannot do that feat," the shrew's goodman shrewdly suggests, and "you'll leave yourself hardly one subject." Once more, in Hotspur we have the fretful, impulsive type, always in hot water, and never shrinking from yet another scalding; as where he is bent on following the king off hand, and giving him a piece, nay the whole, of his mind, red hot, just as it is: And tell him so; for I will ease my heart, Like Agrippa d'Aubigné, he is de cette race cassante qui ne se refuse jamais un coup de langue. Readers of Macaulay's History may remember his sketch of that "fiercest and most audacious" of the refractory Whig members, in 1689, John Howe, who was what is vulgarly called a disinterested man; that is to say, as the Whig historian understands it in this case, if not in all cases, "he valued money less than the pleasure of venting his spleen and of making a sensation." "As to my place," said the Queen's vice-chamberlain, for to that dignity had "Jack" Howe been preferred, "that shall never be a gag to prevent me from speaking my mind." The Mirza Firouz, as pictured by Hajji Baba, had always been famous for the indiscreet use which he made of the great powers of speech with which he was endowed; hence the determination of the grand vizier to inflict upon him the honour of being an ambassador to countries beyond the sun, in the hope of being rid of his tongue perhaps for ever.1 Lord Cochrane was still a raw lieutenant when he gave the first indication of his future character as an uncompromising denouncer of abuses: "I had always a habit of speaking my mind without much reserve," observes the Earl of Dundonald in his autobiography. One of his reviewers contrasts him, to his disadvantage in this respect, with Wellington and Nelson, both of them conspicuous examples of self restraint; both of them sufficiently awake to the shortcomings of the government under which they served, but still not openly denouncing them.2 Not but that the world is the better for a plain speaker, in season. We read of Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, that his attendance about the court did not prevent him from uttering boldly his opinions on church and state affairs, and "saying all kinds of distasteful things even to the king's face," that king being Charles I. The earl's frankness is thus said to have secured him a position in the popular party which his abilities would not have done. It is a fine sight after all, exclaims one admirer of the species, a warm hearted, outspoken, injudicious man, of more than middle age. But this same admirer, who emphatically avows his real affection for "outspoken honesty and truthfulness," in the person too of one who, "if he thought a neighbouring marquis a humbug," would call him what he thought him, and who, "if he thought a bishop a fool, would say so," is yet urgent in his advice to any man who does not 1 Hence too, by collateral issue-Hajji Baba in England. 2 "Lord Dundonald no doubt would say that this was a compromise of principle. But if Nelson had spoken unguardedly of his admiral, and thereby delayed his own promotion, some other officer must have commanded the British fleet off the coast of Egypt, and there might never have been a battle of the Nile." Apply, with a difference, but that not much, the lines in Jonson's Sejanus, concerning one who is bold and free of speech, "Earnest to utter what his zealous thought a course of action which, however honest in the motive, may, "By the over often and unseasoned use, Turn to his loss and danger." wish to be branded as disagreeable, entirely to break off the habit (if he has such a habit) of addressing to even his best friends any sentence beginning with "What a fool you were!" It is not the most agreeable of the gods whom Lucian introduces as vaunting his freedom in speaking his mind, åðìà távtes με ἴσασιν ὡς ἐλευθερός ἐιμι τὴν γλῶτταν. Chartered libertine of Olympus, he sticks by his charter, and sticks up for it: magna charta it is to him. Καὶ λέγω τὰ δοκοῦντὰ μοι ἐς τὸ φανερὸν, ὄντε δεδιώς τινα, ουδὲ ὑπ ̓ αἰδῶς ἐπικαλύπτων τὴν γνώμην. Addison pictures in "cousin Tom" a lively, impudent clown, "one of those country squires, that set up for plain honest gentlemen who speak their minds." Like one of the inhabitants of Crabbe's Borough, when thus in glee, "I speak my mind, I love the truth,' quoth he ; 'Tis sometimes prudent not to speak the mind." But even hard experience fails to teach some this sometimes prudence. Madame, Mère du Régent Orleans, honest outspoken German frau amid the artificialities of the French court, could never be taught not to speak her mind. "Je suis très-franche et très-naturelle, et je dis tout ce que j'ai sur le cœur." But the duchess is not to be classed with the category stigmatized in one of Lady Mary Wortley's letters: "I have seen ladies indulge their own ill humour by being very rude and impertinent, and think they deserved approbation by saying, I love to speak truth." Mrs. Gaskell describes her Mrs. Thornton as taking a savage pleasure in the idea of "speaking her mind," in the guise of a fulfilment of a duty. Washington Irving had yet a name to make as a master of English prose, when he dabbled in satirical verse, at the expense of the incontinently candid, of the gentler (or as the prescriptive phrase has it, the gentle) sex : "Too often our maidens, grown aged I ween, And, at times, when annoyed by the slights of mankind, WH MOURNING FOR A MOTHER. PSALM XXXv. 14. HEN the psalmist would express in the most forcible way the sincerity and the depth of his sympathy, now so cruelly repaid, with the sickness and sorrow of sometime friends, false friends the event was to prove, for now they rewarded him evil for good, to the great discomfort of his soul, 66 -what he says is, that when they were sick he not only put on sackcloth and humbled his soul with fasting, not only behaved himself as though it had been his veriest friend or his own brother-but, as a climax of suggestive illustration, beyond and above all others pathetically significant, that he went heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother." Ages after ages take no force from the expressiveness of that most expressive phrase, nor do they give fresh intensity to it; they neither add thereto, nor diminish from it. It is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. But what full libraries of testimony in confirmation of its force might be collected, were one generation to another to show forth its fulfilled experience, the ever recurring verification of that thrilling truism in home life, in the life of the homeliest! One may suppose that in that case, and upon that subject, the world itself would not contain the books that should be written. Here and there an instance obtrudes itself on the memory, such as that of Sertorius, overwhelmed amid his military triumphs by news of his mother's death-that mother by whom alone the fatherless boy had been educated, and upon whom his affections, which were strong, centred and were fixed. For a full week the Roman general gave himself up to grief inconsolable, nor would he be persuaded to leave his tent, but lay there on the ground, in literal dejection, supine and supreme. Or again, in these later days, one thinks of Etty the painter, the intensity of whose grief at his aged mother's death is so feelingly manifest in his always cordial letters; and who remained in the house for days, and refused to be comforted, until a visit to the minster of his native city (York) availed to rouse him from his torpor of afflic |