love. The foregoing observations, therefore, it is hoped, may have gained a little ground in favour of the precept before us the particular explanation of which shall be the subject of the next discourse.

I will conclude at present with observing the peculiar obligation which we are under to virtue and religion, as enforced in the verses following the text, in the epistle for the day, from our Saviour's coming into the world:-"The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light," &c. The meaning and force of which exhortation is, that Christianity lays us under new obligations to a good life, as by it the will of God is more clearly revealed, and as it affords additional motives to the practice of it, over and above those which arise out of the nature of virtue and vice; I might add, as our Saviour has set us a perfect example of goodness in our own nature. Now love and charity is plainly the thing in which He hath placed His religion; in which, therefore, as we have any pretence to the name of Christians, we must place ours. He hath at once enjoined it upon us by way of command with peculiar force; and by His example, as having undertaken the work of our salvation out of pure love and good-will to mankind. The endeavour to set home this example upon our minds is a very proper employment of this season, which is bringing on the festival of His birth; which as it may teach us many excellent lessons of humility, resignation, and obedience to the will of God, so there is none it recommends with greater authority, force, and advantage, than this of love and charity; since it was "for us men, and for our salvation," that "He came down from heaven, and was incarnate, and was made man," that He might teach us our duty, and more especially that He might enforce the practice of it, reform mankind, and finally bring us to that "eternal salvation," of which "He is the Author to all those that obey Him."

[ROBERT MUDIE, a voluminous writer of our own times, died in 1842, aged 64. He was a self-educated Scotsman, full of various knowledge, but that knowledge not always of the most accurate character. As a writer, he was singularly unequal; which may be attributed to the constant pressure of his circumstances, compelling him to be ready to employ his pen upon any subject, however unsuited to his taste or acquirements. He had been a diligent observer of nature before he became familiar with the life of literary toil in London; and there are passages in some of his writings which exhibit the same powers of the genuine naturalist that characterise the works of White and Wilson. His "Guide to the Observation of Nature" contains a fund of hints for the study of natural objects. No one can read the following extract from his "Feathered Tribes of the British Islands" (and the work abounds with passages of similar interest) without being satisfied that this man, neglected as he was by his learned contemporaries, had a rare talent for observation, a vivid imagination, and a power of description that might have achieved very high things, under circumstances more favourable for mental cultivation and moral discipline than his lot afforded.]

The bittern is in many respects an interesting bird, but it is a bird of the wilds-almost a bird of desolation, avoiding alike the neighbourhood of man and the progress of man's improvements.

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It is a bird of rude nature, where the land knows no character save that which the untrained working of the elements impresses upon it; so that, when any locality is in the course of being won to usefulness, the bittern is the first to depart, and when any one is abandoned it is the last to return. "The bittern shall dwell there" is the final curse, and implies that the place is to become uninhabited and uninhabitable. It hears not the whistle of the ploughman or the sound of the mattock; and the tinkle of the sheep-bell or the lowing of an ox (although the latter bears so much resemblance to its own hollow and dismal voice that it has given foundation to the name) is a signal for it to be gone.

Extensive and dingy pools,-if moderately upland, so much the better,-which lie in the hollows, catching like so many traps the lighter and more fertile mould which the rains wash and the winds blow from the naked heights around, and converting it into harsh and dingy vegetation, and the pasture of those loathsome things which mingle in the ooze, or crawl and swim in the putrid and mantling waters, are the habitations of the bittern: places which scatter blight and mildew over every herb which is more delicate than a sedge, a carex, or a rush, and consume every wooded plant that is taller than the sapless and tasteless crowberry, or the creeping upland willow; which shed murrain over the quadrupeds, or chills which eat the flesh off their bones; and which, if man ventures there, consume him by putrid fever in the hot and dry season, and shake to pieces with ague when the weather is cold and humid -places from which the heath and the lichen stand aloof, and where even the raven, lover of disease, and battener upon all that expires miserably and exhausted, comes rarely, and with more than wonted caution, lest that death which he comes to seal or riot upon in others, should unawares come upon himself. The raven loves carrion on the dry and unpoisoning moor, scents it from afar, and hastens to it upon his best and boldest wing; but "the reek o' the rotten fen" is loathsome to the sense of even the raven, and it is hunger's last pinch ere he come nigh to the chosen habitation,-the only loved abode, of the bittern.

The bittern appears as if it hated the beams of that sun which

calls forth the richness and beauty of nature which it so studiously avoids; for, though with anything but music, it hails the fall of night with as much energy, and no doubt, to its own feeling, with as much glee and joy as the birds of brighter places hail the rising of the morn. Altogether it is a singular bird; and yet there is a sublimity about it of a more heart-stirring character than that which is to be found where the air is balmy and the vegetation rich, and nature keeps holiday in holiday attire. It is a bird of the confines beyond which we can imagine nothing but utter ruin; and all subjects which trench on that terrible bourn have a deep though a dismal interest.

And, to those who are nerved and sinewed for the task, the habitation of the bittern is well worthy of a visit, not merely as it teaches us how much we owe to the successive parent generations that subdued those dismal places, and gradually brought the country to that state of richness and beauty in which we found it, but also on account of the extreme of contrast, and the discovery of that singular charm and enchantment with which nature is in all cases so thoroughly imbued and invested; so that where man cannot inhabit, he must still admire; and even there he can trace the plan, adore the power, and bless the goodness of that Being in whose sight all the works of the creation are equally good.

On a fine clear day in the early part of the season, when the winds of March have dried the heath, and the dark surface, obedient to the action of the sun, becomes soon warm and turns the exhalations which steal from the marsh upwards, so that they are dissipated in the higher atmosphere, and cross not that boundary to injure the more fertile and cultivated places-even the sterile heath and the stagnant pool, though adverse to our cultivation, have their uses in wild nature; but for these, in a climate like ours, and in the absence of nature, the chain of life would speedily be broken.

Upon such a day, it is not unpleasant to ramble toward the abode of the bittern, and, to those especially who dwell where all around is art, and where the tremulous motion of the ever-trundling wheel of society dizzies the understanding, till one fancies

that the stable laws of nature turn round in concert with the minor revolutions of our pursuits, it is far from being unprofitable. Man, so circumstanced, is apt to descend in intellect as low, or even lower, than those unclad men of the woods whom he despises; and there is no better way of enabling him to win back his birthright as a rational and reflective being, than a taste of the cup of wild nature, even though its acerbity should make him writhe at the time. That is the genuine medicine of the mind, far better than all the opiates of the library, and the bounding pulse of glowing and glorious thought returns all the sooner for its being a little drastic.

None perhaps acts more speedily than a taste of the sea. Take a man who has never been beyond the "hum" of the city, or the chime of the village clock, and whose thoughts float along with the current of public news in the one, or stagnate in the lazy pool of village chancings in the other, put him on shipboard on a fine evening, when the glassy water has that blink of greenish purple which landsmen admire, and seamen understand; give him offing till the turn of the night; then let the wind be loosed at once, and the accumulating waves heave fathoms up and sink fathoms down; let there be sea-room, and trim the bark to drive, now vibrating on the ridge of the unbroken wave, now plunging into the thick of that which has been broken by its own violence, and hissing as if the heat of her career and collision were making the ocean to boil, as when the nether fire upheaves a volcanic isle; temper his spirit in those waters for even one night, and when you again land him safely you will find him tenfold more a man of steel.

A calm day in the wilderness is, of course, mildness itself compared with such a night; but still there is an absence of art, and consequently a touch of the sublime of nature in it; it suits the feeble-minded, for it invigorates without fear.

The dry height is silent, save the chirp of the grasshopper, or the hum of some stray bee which the heat of the day has tempted out, to see if there are any honeyed blooms among the heath; but, by and by, you hear the warning whistle of the plover,