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It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, to flatter his opinions by acquiescence, and sink him yet deeper in absurdity. This artifice of mischief was admired by Stella ; and Swift seems to approve her admiration.

If any judgment be made, from his books, of his moral character, nothing will be found but purity and excellence. Knowledge of mankind, indeed, less extensive than that of Addison will show, that to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue do no more than praise it. Yet it is reasonable to believe that Addison's professions and practice were at no great variance, since, amidst that storm of faction in which most of his life was passed, though his station made him conspicuous, and his activity made him formidable, the character given him by his friends was never contradicted by his enemies of those with whom interest or opinion united him he had not only the esteem, but the kindness; and of others, whom the violence of opposition drove against him, though he might lose the love, he retained the reverence.

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NOTES.-Johnson, Dr. Samuel.-An eminent critic, miscellaneous writer, and lexicographer. He was born at Lichfield in 1709, and died in London, 1784, having risen to be the centre of London literary society for many years before his death. Always fond of ponderous sonorous words and of a rhetorical style, his later writings are nevertheless much freer from these defects than his earlier. This extract is from "The Lives of the Poets," published in 1779-81, only three years before he died. Johnson was buried in Westminster Abbey. Addison, Joseph.-Born at Milston, Wilts, 1672. His daughter died in 1797, unmarried. He was buried in Westminster. where Johnson says: "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." Pope, Alexander.A famous English poet. Son of a linendraper in the Strand. Born, 1688; died, 1744. Gay, John.-An English poet. Born at Barnstaple, Devonshire, in 1688. Died, 1732. Buried in Westminster Abbey. He is now remembered most by his "Fables." Holland House.-The mansion of Lord Holland, London. Built by Sir Walter Cope, in 1607. Born, 1627; died, 1716. Steele, Sir Richard.-One of the famous "English Essayists" of Addison's day. Born at Dublin, 1671; died, 1729, in Wales. Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of).-Born, 1694; died, 1773. Esteemed in his day a man of

wit and literary taste. Terence.-A Latin dramatic poet-a native of Carthagesold as a slave but freed by his master, whose name, as the custom was, he took. Born about B.C. 218; died about B.C. 159. Catullus.-A Latin poet. Born at Verona, B.C. 86; died B.C. 46. Dryden, John.-An eminent English poet and prose writer. Born, 1631; died, in London, 1700. Buried in Westminster Abbey. His prose is perhaps the finest in the language; his satires are admirable, his translations gross; his plays are forgotten. Congreve, William.-An English dramatist. Born in Yorkshire, 1672. Died in London, 1729. Buried in Westminster. Spectator. -A famous literary periodical begun by Steele and Addison, March 1, 1711, and continued for 555 numbers, till Dec. 6, 1712. Addison subsequently tried to revive it, but could not. Cato.-A tragedy of Addison's, published in 1713. Swift, Jonathan.-Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin: a great political writer of Addison's day. His style makes him a classic, but he is often coarse and even obscene. Born at Dublin, 1667; died, 1745. Stella.-Miss Esther Johnson, who is said to have been secretly married to Swift, but never being acknowledged by him as his wife, broke her heart and died in 1727. Swift afterwards treated another lady, "Vanessa -Miss Vanhomrigh-in the same utterly heartless way. He was the author of "Gulliver's Travels," which was a satire on the politicians of the day. He sank into imbecility for some time before he died.

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How closely he twineth, how tight he clings
To his friend, the huge Oak Tree!
And slily he traileth along the ground,
And his leaves he gently waves,

And he joyously twines and hugs around
The rich mould of dead men's graves.
Creeping where grim death has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled, and their works decay'd,
And nations have scattered been;

But the stout old Ivy shall never fade
From its hale and hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days
Shall fatten on the past;

For the stateliest building man can raise
Is the Ivy's food at last.

Creeping on where time has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
*See p. 28, "Fifth Reader."

THE SICK CHILD.-Charles Dickens.*

SOME years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane members of the humane medical profession, on a morning tour among some of the worst-lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place—I am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are-we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in a life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky, shut out from the air, mere pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children crouching on the bare ground near it-where, I remember as I speak, the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained and time-stained house-wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which had shaken everything else there had shaken even it— there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly partingthere he lay, quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he seldom complained; "He lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a' aboot." God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering reasons for wondering how it could possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the birds that never got near him-reasons for wondering how he came to be left there, a little decrepit old man, pining to death, quite a thing of course, as if there were no crowds of healthy and happy children playing on the grass under the summer's sun within a stone's throw of him, as if there were no bright, moving sea on the other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and movement, and vigour anywhere in the world—nothing but stoppage and decay. There he lay looking *See page 28, "Fifth Reader."

at us, saying in his silence, more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any orator in my life," Will you please to tell me what this means, strange man? and if you can give me any good reason why I should be so soon, so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children were to come into His presence, and were not to be forbidden, but who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard road by which I am travelling; pray give that reason to me, for I seek it very earnestly and wonder about it very much; and to my mind he has been wondering about it ever since. Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in this London; many a poor sick child I have seen most affectionately and kindly tended by poor people, in an unwholesome house and under untoward circumstances, wherein its recovery was quite impossible; but at all such times I have seen my poor little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb speech to me, and I have always found him wondering what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be!

COMPOSITION.-Write out this story in your own words, briefly, with the proper punctuation, &c.

CHANGES OF LANGUAGE.-Anon.

We need only trace back the stream of time about a thousand years, to find among the languages of Anglo-Saxon England, of Holland and Lower Germany, and of Upper Germany, a resemblance which certainly amounted to mutual intelligibility. The great mass of words in the languages spoken over this area was essentially the same, varied only by dialectic difference; and the structure of the grammar, except in some of the person-endings of verbs, was identical or analogous. Yet now, whatever radical affinity scientific dissection may reveal among the three prominent forms of speech in the countries above-named-i. e. German, Dutch, and English-it is found that, though German has changed least, and Dutch less than English, practically a person speaking only one of these needs. an interpreter for the other two. Once, a national song might, without translation, have gained popularity over all these lands; now there are three wholly distinct, and in many points unsympathetic, literatures.

We have only to go back eight hundred years, to find all over Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland one uniform tongue prevalent among all classes. And we have only to look at the present condition of things to discover this singular alteration-that, while the original language has remained without substantial change in Iceland alone, in Sweden it has taken one new form, and in Denmark and Norway another; so that there are now three languages where there was but one, and he who possesses a native knowledge of only a single member of the trio must learn the other two with grammar and dictionary.

Furthermore, in the south of Europe, a retrospect of fifteen hundred years will show us the entire body of the influential classes throughout the modern Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Wallachia, and other countries also, using as their mothertongue the Latin language, with such perfect uniformity that no scrutiny can detect among which of the populations abovenamed a Latin book of that period was produced. Yet now we have, of languages and literatures derived from the disintegrated Latin, no less than six prominently distinct, and, of minor forms of the same, a great many more. A Spaniard and an Italian may doubtless acquire each other's language more readily than a German or a Hollander would that of either of them; but without this special acquisition all interchange of thought and feeling is at an end among these respective nations apparently for ever.

The linguistic fact, that about A.D. 400 all these numerous populations had accepted the tongue of Rome, is only the obverse of the social fact, that Rome had for them become the pivot, upon which all their interests, civil, moral, and intellectual, were revolving. And ever since the epoch when, through the Barbaric Irruption, Rome ceased to be this, the number of languages sprung from the Latin has tended to vary as the number of states at that time existing within the ancient Roman territory. In the Iberian peninsula Catalan decays and declines, because the realm of which it was the vernacular has been absorbed by the kingdom of Castile, which, having annexed two-thirds of the Trans-Pyrenean region, and centred its sway at Madrid, has made its language predominant throughout all Spain, under the native and only correct title of "La Lengua Castellana." Portuguese, on the other hand, still holds its ground, because Portugal resolutely rejected this Castilian centralization. In France, the Provençal gave way

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