on, thank Heaven! like a house o' fire, and think the next Pickwick will bang all the others."

It may be observed that most authors are apt to esteem their last work as their very best, and praise does not seem to have been unacceptable to Dickens, as appears from a reply he made to Lord Lytton, as follows:

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“I received your letter in praise of 'Dr. Marigold,' and read and re-read all your generous words fifty times over, with inexpressible delight. I cannot tell you how they gratified and affected me."

In a letter to Thomas Hutton about one of his earlier works, the "Christmas Carol," the following is found:

"MY DEAR HUTTON,— I am extremely glad you feel the Carol. For I know I meant a good thing; and when I see the effect of such a little whole as that, on those for whom I care, I have a strong sense of the immense effect I could produce with an entire book. I am quite certain of that."

ANTHONY TROLLOPE, in the "North American Review," writes very patronizingly of our poet Longfellow, says he has "crept up to our hearts," and assures his readers that he is an "uncommonly pleasant fellow;" but he does not allow him to be quite the equal of his favorite English poets. He

would not hurt his feelings, but then he is "not great -seldom magnificent." In order to unfold the poetic graces of Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Trollope contrives to push his own merits to the front, and is kind enough to say:

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"I myself cannot describe places; I enjoy the beauty and the feeling of scenic effect, but I lack the words to render them delightful to others. But I have some trick in depicting scenes, and have been often complimented on my sketch of clerical life. I am told that I must have lived in cathedral cities, and the like, and have with a certain mild denial carried off the compliments.'

Mr. Longfellow is always modest; and, with all his readers, here and abroad, never claimed that he was "often complimented;" nor "carried off the compliments with a certain mild denial."

PERHAPS no modern writer has presented to the public more or better examples of attractive and sparkling English than Mr. Ruskin. Whether we agree with him or not, his original and racy style, as in the "Stones of Venice," will long command attention; and yet his unbounded satisfaction with his own ex cathedra judgment upon all questions of politics, as well as of the arts, and of all things human and divine, is less hidden by any modest drapery than the limbs of a ballet-dancer in a French opera-house.

His preface to the letters just published runs and ripples with what he appropriately describes as "extremely fine compliments to himself." Dated at Rouen, he finds himself, he says, "lying in bed in the morning, reading these remnants of my old self, and that with much contentment and thankful applause." As to the letters, he adds: "In the entire mass of them there is not a word I wish to change, not a statement I have to retract; and, I believe, few pieces of advice which the reader will not find it for his good to act upon."

One more extract from this lofty preface to lofty letters of forty years, which in their day were by no means dull reading:

"Whatever (for instance) I have urged in economy has ten times the force when it is remembered to have been pleaded for by a man loving the splendor and advising the luxury of ages which overlaid their towers with gold and their walls with ivory. No man oftener than I has had cast into his teeth the favorite adage of the insolent and the feeble, -ne sutor. But it has always been forgotten by the speakers that, although the proverb might on some occasions be wisely spoken by an artist to a cobbler, it could never be wisely spoken by a cobbler to an artist.”1

1 On a steamer from Calais to Dover (Oct. 1, 1880), one of the passengers was pointed out to me as Ruskin. He was rather thin and small, about five feet seven inches in height, with an undue proportion of legs, and wore a swallow-tail coat and a bright blue necktie. His age might be about sixty-five; his appearance was slightly eccentric.

Mr. Ruskin does not seem, after the lapse of years, to have much diminished his estimate of himself, and in the preface to the edition of 1880 of "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" he says:

"The quite First Edition, with the original plates, will always, I venture to say, bear a high price in the market; for its etchings were not only, every line of them, by my hand, but bitten also with savage carelessness (I being then, as now, utterly scornful of all sorts of art dependent on blotch, or burr, or any other 'process' than that of steady hand and true line); out of which disdain, nevertheless, some of the plates came into effects both right and good for their purpose, and will, as I say, be always hereafter valuable."

JOHN WALKER VILANT MACBETH.

THE mule undoubtedly, if it thinks at all, thinks itself superior to the horse or the ass, and reckons that it possesses the merits of both races without their drawbacks. It has both long life and long ears. Here is a specimen in Prof. John Walker Vilant Macbeth, who published his "Might and Mirth of Literature" in 1875. On page 51 he says: "Admire with intense enjoyment the ivory finish, the fairy-like, delicate polish and vocalization of the lines we refer to. Your gathering of a hundred of them will of itself entitle you to be named as a person of exquisite

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taste; while you will have in your possession a pellucid fountain of enjoyment the most refined." then gives no more than a line each of Byron, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Milton, and Chaucer, and eight lines of his own. Here is one he stole from James Beattie and misquoted:

"He thought as a sage, but he felt as a man.'

And that is all we shall want, I think, from this 'pellucid fountain."

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B. 1771.

SYDNEY SMITH.

D. 1845.

WHEN advised to have his portrait painted by Landseer, who was eminent as a painter of men, and more so as a painter of dogs, Smith asked, "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"

DR. SAMUEL PARR.

"THE first Greek scholar," said Dr. Parr, "is Porson; the third is Dr. Burney; I leave you to guess who is the second."

B. 1771.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

D. 1832.

FEW men with a reputation so wide and enduring as that of Sir Walter Scott have been more modest and clear of all manifestations of vanity, — excluding,