tion to the object of it. How grateful should I have been for anything which would have relieved me from its oppressive weight -a buzz, a scraping of the shoes, or a fit of coughing would have put me under infinite obligation to the kind disturber. What I said, I know not; I knew not then; it is the only part of the transaction of which I am ignorant; it was a "phantasma or a hideous dream." They told me, however, to my great surprise, that I spoke in a loud voice, used violent gesture, and as I went along seemed to shake off my trepidation. Whether I made a long speech or a short one, I cannot tell, for I had no power of measuring time. All I know is, that I should have made a much longer one if I had not felt my ideas, like Bob Acres's courage, oozing out of my fingers' ends. The court decided against us, erroneously, as I of course thought, for the young advocate is always on the right side.

The next morning I got up early to look at the newspapers, which I expected to see full of our case. In an obscure corner, and in a small type, I found a few words given as the speeches of my leaders, and I also read that "Mr followed on the same side."

LEVELLING.- "Sir, I would no more deprive a nobleman of his respect than of his money. I consider myself as acting a part in the great system of society, and I do to others as I would have them do to me. I would behave to a nobleman as I should expect he would behave to me, were I a nobleman and he Sam Johnson. Sir, there is one Mrs Macaulay in this town, a great republican. One day, when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, 'Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible

civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.' I thus, sir, showed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?" BOSWELL. Life of Johnson.

QUACKERY IN The SeventeentH CENTURY.—In the course of my life I have often pleased or entertained myself with observing the various and fantastical changes of the diseases generally complained of, and of the remedies in common vogue, which were like birds of passage, very much seen or heard of at one season, and disappeared at another, and commonly succeeded by some of a very different kind. When I was very young, nothing was so much feared or talked of as rickets among children, and consumption among young people of both sexes. After these, the spleen came in play, and grew a formal disease: then the scurvy, which was the general complaint, and both were thought to ap pear in many various guises. After these, and for a time, nothing was so much talked of as the ferment of the blood, which passed for the cause of all sorts of ailments, that neither physicians nor patients knew well what to make of. And to all these succeeded vapours, which serve the same turn, and furnish occasion of complaint among persons whose bodies or minds ail something, but they know not what, and among the Chinese would pass for mists of the mind or fumes of the brain, rather than indispositions of any other parts. Yet these employ our physicians, perhaps more than other diseases, who are fain to humour such patients in their fancies of being ill, and to prescribe some remedies for fear of losing their practice to others that pretend more skill in finding out the cause of diseases or care in advising remedies, which neither they nor their patients find any effect of, besides some gains to one and amusement to the other. This, I suppose, may have contributed much to the mode of going to the waters, either cold or hot, upon so many occasions, or else upon none besides

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that of entertainment, and which commonly may have no other effect. And it is well if this be the worst of the frequent use of those waters, which, though commonly innocent, yet are sometimes dangerous if the temper of the person or cause of the indisposition be unhappily mistaken, especially in people of age. As diseases have changed vogue, so have remedies in my time and observation. I remember at one time the taking of tobacco, at another the drinking of warm beer, proved for universal remedies; then swallowing of pebble stones, in imitation of falconers curing hawks. One doctor pretended to help all heats and fevers by drinking as much cold spring water as the patient could bear; at another time swallowing a spoonful of powder of sea-biscuit after meals was infallible for all indigestions, and so preventing diseases. Then coffee and tea began their successive reigns. The infusion or powder of steel have had their turns, and certain drops of several names and compositions; but none that I find have established their authority, either long or generally, by any constant and sensible successes of their reign, but have rather passed like a mode, which every one is apt to follow, and finds the most convenient or graceful while it lasts, and begins to dislike it in both those respects when it goes out of fashion.-SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE'S Miscellanea.

All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. -SHELLEY. Letters.

Rage is essentially vulgar, and never vulgarer than when it proceeds from mortified pride, disappointed ambition, or thwarted wilfulness. A baffled despot is the vulgarest of dirty wretches, no matter whether he be the despot of a nation vindicating its rights, or of a donkey sinking under its load.—HARTLEY COLERIDGE. Biographia Borealis.

IMPEDIMENTS TO THE PROGRESS of Truth.-Truth and error, as they are essentially opposite in their nature, so the causes to which they are indebted for their perpetuity and triumph are not less so. Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry, is favourable to error: whatever promotes it, to truth. But nothing, it will be

acknowledged, has a greater tendency to obstruct the exercise of free inquiry than the spirit and feeling of a party. Let a doctrine, however erroneous, become a party distinction, and it is at once intrenched in interests and attachments which make it extremely difficult for the most powerful artillery of reason to dislodge it. It becomes a point of honour in the leaders of such parties, which is from thence communicated to their followers, to defend and support their respective peculiarities to the last; and, as a natural consequence, to shut their ears against all the pleas and remonstrances by which they are assailed. Even the wisest and best of men are seldom aware how much they are susceptible of this sort of influence; and while the offer of a world would be insufficient to engage them to recant a known truth, or to subscribe an acknowledged error, they are often retained in a willing captivity to prejudices and opinions which have no other support, and which, if they could lose sight of party feelings, they would almost instantly abandon.-REV. ROBERT HALL.

FASHION. While the world lasts, fashion will continue to lead it by the nose. And, after all, what can fashion do for its most obsequious followers? It can ring the changes upon the same things, and it can do no more. Whether our hats be white or black, our caps high or low, whether we wear two watches or one, is of little consequence. There is indeed an appearance of variety; but the folly and vanity that dictate and adopt the change are invariably the same. When the fashions of a particular period appear more reasonable than those of the preceding, it is not because the world has grown more reasonable than it was; but because, in a course of perpetual changes, some of them must sometimes happen to be for the better. Neither do I suppose the preposterous customs that prevail at present a proof of its greater folly. In a few years, perhaps next year, the fine gentleman will shut up his umbrella, and give it to his sister, filling his hand with a crab-tree cudgel instead of it: and when he has done so will he be wiser than now? By no means. The love of change will have betrayed him into a propriety which, in reality, he has no taste; for all his merit on the occasion

amounting to no more than this-that, being weary of one plaything, he has taken up another.-COWPER.

GENIUS.—I never knew a poet, except myself, who was punctual in anything, or to be depended on for the due discharge of any duty, except what he thought he owed to the Muses. The moment a man takes it into his foolish head that he has what the world calls genius, he gives himself a discharge from the servile drudgery of all friendly offices, and becomes good for nothing, except in the pursuit of his favourite employment.COWPER.

NASEBY FIELD.-The old hamlet of Naseby stands yet on its old hill-top, very much as it did in Saxon days, on the northwestern border of Northamptonshire, some seven or eight miles from Market-Harborough in Leicestershire, nearly on a line, and nearly midway, between that town and Daventry. A peaceable old hamlet, of perhaps five hundred souls; clay cottages for labourers, but neatly thatched and swept; smith's shop, saddler's shop, beer shop, all in order; forming a kind of square, which leads off, north and south, into two long streets: the old church, with its graves, stands in the centre, the truncated spire finishing itself with a strange old ball, held up by rods; a "hollow copper ball, which came from Boulogne in Henry the Eighth's time," which has, like Hudibras' breeches, "been at the siege of Bullen.' The ground is upland, moorland, though now growing corn; was not enclosed till the last generation, and is still somewhat bare of wood. It stands nearly in the heart of England. Gentle dullness, taking a turn at etymology, sometimes derives it from Navel; "Navesby, quasi Navelsby, from being," &c. Avon Well, the distinct source of Shakspere's Avon, is on the western slope of the high grounds; Nen and Welland, streams leading towards Cromwell's Fen-Country, begin to gather themselves from boggy places on the eastern side. The grounds, as we say, lie high; and are still, in their new subdivisions, known by the name of " Hills," "Rutput Hill," "Mill Hill," "Dust Hill," and the like, precisely as in Rushworth's time; but they are not properly hills at all; they are broad, blunt, clayey masses, swell.