for honour, and rank for dignity, have long planned a splendid connexion for me, to which, though my invariable repugnance has stopped any advances, their wishes and their views immovably adhere. I am but too certain they will listen to no other. I dread, therefore, to make a trial where I despair of success. I know not how to risk a prayer with those who may silence me by a command.' MADAME D'ARBLAY.-Cecilia.

III

He was assaulted, during his precipitated return, by the rudest fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad accommodations and innumerable accidents, he became a prey to the merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, which barely suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such was the check that almost instantly curbed, though it could not subdue, the rising pleasure of his hopes of entering upon a new species of existence that of an approved man of letters; for it was on the bed of sickness, exchanging the light wines of France, Italy, and Germany, for the black and loathsome potions of the Apothecaries' Hall, writhed by darting stitches, and burning with fiery fever, that he felt the full force of that sublunary equipoise that seems evermore to hang suspended over the attainment of long-sought and uncommon felicity, just as it is ripening to burst forth into enjoyment!..

If beneficence be judged by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs. Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vainglory, then, but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty objects, for one bright morning, cease to consider themselves as degraded outcasts from society.

MADAME D'ARBLAY.-Memoirs of Dr. Burney.

THE CHRISTENING

THE day of the christening being come, and the house filled with gossips, the levity of whose conversation suited but ill with the gravity of Dr. Cornelius, he cast about how to pass this day more agreeably to his character; that is to say, not without some profitable conference, nor wholly without observance of some ancient custom.

:

He remembered to have read in Theocritus, that the cradle of Hercules was a shield and being possessed of an antique buckler, which he held as a most inestimable relic, he determined to have the infant laid therein, and in that manner brought into the study, to be shown to certain learned men of his acquaintance.

The regard he had for this shield had caused him formerly to compile a dissertation concerning it, proving from the several properties and particularly the colour of the rust, the exact chronology thereof.

With this treatise, and a moderate supper, he proposed to entertain his guests, though he had also another design, to have their assistance in the calculation of his son's nativity.

He therefore took the buckler out of a case (in which he always kept it, lest it might contract any modern rust), and entrusted it to his housemaid, with orders that when the company was come she should lay the child carefully in it, covered with a mantle of blue satin.

The guests were no sooner seated but they entered into a warm debate about the Triclinium, and the manner of Decubitus, of the ancients, which Cornelius broke off in this manner :

This day, my friends, I purpose to exhibit my son before you a child not wholly unworthy of inspection, as he is descended from a race of virtuosi. Let the physiognomists examine his features; let the chirographists behold his palm; but, above all, let us consult for the calculation of his nativity. To this end, as the child is not vulgar, I will not present him unto you in a vulgar manner. He shall be cradled in my ancient shield, so famous through the universities of Europe. You all know how I purchased that invaluable piece of antiquity at the great (though indeed inadequate) expense of all the plate of our family,

how happily I carried it off, and how triumphantly I transported it hither, to the inexpressible grief of all Germany. Happy in every circumstance but that it broke the heart of the great Melchior Insipidus!

Here he stopped his speech, upon sight of the maid, who entered the room with the child; he took it in his arms, and proceeded :

'Behold then my child, but first behold the shield, behold this rust, or rather let me call it this precious aerugo, behold this beautiful varnish of time, this venerable verdure of so many ages!' In speaking these words he slowly lifted up the mantle which covered it, inch by inch; but at every inch he uncovered his cheeks grew paler, his hand trembled, his nerves failed, till on sight of the whole the tremor became universal, the shield and the infant both dropped to the ground, and he had only strength enough to cry out, O God! my shield, my

shield !'

The truth was, the maid (extremely concerned for the reputation of her own cleanliness, and her young master's honour) had scoured it as her andirons.

Cornelius sunk back on a chair, the guests stood astonished, the infant squalled, the maid ran in, snatched. it up again in her arms, flew into her mistress's room, and told what had happened. Downstairs in an instant hurried all the gossips, where they found the doctor in a trance. Hungary-water, hartshorn, and the confused noise of shrill voices, at length awakened him, when, opening his eyes he saw the shield in the hands of the housemaid. O woman, woman!' he cried (and snatched it violently from her), ‘Was it to thy ignorance that this relic owes its ruin? Where, where is the beautiful crust that covered thee so long? where those traces of time, and fingers as it were of antiquity? where all those beautiful obscurities, the cause of much delightful disputation, where doubt and curiosity went hand in hand and eternally exercised the speculations of the learned? All this the rude touch of an ignorant woman hath done away! Oh my shield! my shield! well may I say with Horace, "Non bene relicta parmula!" "

66

J. ARBUTHNOT.-Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus.

OXFORD

It is not from any selfish motives that I prefer to stand alone, and to concentrate on myself, as a plain citizen of the republic of letters, and not as an office-bearer in a hierarchy, the whole responsibility for all I write; it is much more out of genuine devotion to the University of Oxford, for which I feel, and always must feel, the fondest, the most reverential attachment. In an epoch of dissolution and transformation, such as that on which we are now entered, habits, ties, and associations are inevitably broken up, the action of individuals becomes more distinct, the shortcomings, errors, heats, disputes, which necessarily attend individual action, are brought into greater prominence. Who would not gladly keep clear, from all these passing clouds, an august institution which was there before they arose, and which will be there when they have blown over ?

We are all seekers still: seekers often make mistakes, and I wish mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch Oxford. Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene !

There are our young barbarians, all at play!

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, -to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?-nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the

praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him ;-the bondage of was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?

M. ARNOLD.-Essays in Criticism.

ENGLISH AND FRENCH PROSE: A CONTRAST

SOME of the requisites of intellectual work are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibility of intelligence. The form, the method of evolution, the precision, the proportions, the relations of the parts to the whole, in an intellectual work, depend mainly upon them. And these are the elements of an intellectual work which are really most communicable from it, which can most be learned and adopted from it, which have, therefore, the greatest effect upon the intellectual performance of others. Even in poetry, these requisites are very important; and the poetry of a nation, not eminent for the gifts on which they depend, will, more or less, suffer by this shortcoming. In poetry, however, they are, after all, secondary, and energy is the first thing; but in prose they are of first-rate importance. In its prose literature, therefore, and in the routine of intellectual work generally, a nation, with no particular gifts for these, will not be so successful. .. How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! how much better, in general, do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence! One may constantly remark this in the work of individuals; how much more striking, in general, does any Englishmanof some vigour of mind, but by no means a poet,-seem in his verse than in his prose! No doubt his verse suffers from the same defects which impair his prose, and he cannot express himself with real success in it; but how much more powerful a personage does he appear in it, by

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