DETACHED GEMS.

MANY people are of opinion that the Romans only understood what the capabilities of dinner were. It is certain that they were the first great people that discovered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now so generally acting on. Barbarous nations- and none were, in that respect, more barbarous than our own ancestors made this capital blunder: the brutes, if you asked them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, stared at you, and replied as a horse would reply, if you put the same question about his provender — that it was to give him strength for finishing his work! Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity about twelve or one o'clock in the daytime, you will descry our most worthy ancestors all eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat — viz., in bodily fear that some other dog will come and take their dinner away. What swelling of the veins in the temples (see Boswell's natural history of Dr. Johnson at dinner) what intense and rapid deglutition! what odious clatter of knives and plates! what silence of the human voice! what gravity! what fury in the libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes! Positively it was an indecent spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, above all, what maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend were waiting with red-hot pincers to lay hold of the hindermost!

Oh, reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours? Excuse me for saying "What monsters!" I have a right to call my own ancestors monsters; and, if so, I must have the same right over yours. For Southey has shown plainly in the "Doctor," that every man having four grandparents in the second stage of ascent, consequently (since each of those four will have had four grandparents) sixteen in the third stage, consequently sixtyfour in the fourth, consequently two hundred and fiftysix in the fifth, and so on, it follows that, long before you get to the Conquest, every man and women then living in England will be wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors; consequently you must take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for that) you must go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being clearly mine, I have a right in law to call the whole "kit" of them monsters. Quod erat demonstrandum. Really and upon my honor, it makes one, for the moment, ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disinherit one's-self backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the "Rivals ") to "cut the con

nection."

IN a celebrated satire (The Pursuits of Literature,) much read in my youth, and which I myself read about twenty-five years ago, I remember one counsel - there addressed to young men, but in fact, of universal application. "I call upon them," said the author, to "dare to be ignorant of many things: " a wise counsel, and justly expressed; for it requires much courage to forsake popular paths of knowledge, merely upon a

conviction that they are not favorable to the ultimate ends of knowledge.

How feeble a conception must that man have of the infinity which lurks in a human spirit, who can persuade himself that its total capacities of life are exhaustible by the few gross acts incident to social relations or open to human valuation! An act, which may be necessarily limited and without opening for variety, may involve a large variety of motives - motives again, meaning grounds of action that are distinctly recognized for such, may (numerically speaking) amount to nothing at all when compared with the absolutely infinite influxes of feeling or combination of feeling that vary the thoughts of man; and the true internal acts of moral man are his thoughts, his yearnings, his aspirations, his sympathies, his repulsions of heart. This is the life of man as it is appreciable by heavenly eyes. The scale of an alphabet, how narrow is that! Four or six and twenty letters, and all is finished. Syllables range through a wider compass. Words are yet more than syllables. But what are words to thoughts? Every word has a thought corresponding to it, so that not by so much as one solitary counter can the words outrun the thoughts. But every thought has not a word corresponding to it; so that the thoughts may outrun the words by many a thousand counters. In a developed nature they do so. But what are the thoughts when set against the modifications of thoughts by feelings, hidden even from him that feels them, or against the inter-combinations of such modifications with others -complex with complex, decomplex with decomplex —

these can be unravelled by no human eye! This is the infinite music that God only can read upon the vast harp of the human heart. Some have fancied that musical combinations might be exhausted. A new Mozart might be impossible. All that he could do might already have been done. Music laughs at that, as the sea laughs at palsy for its billows, as the morning laughs at old age and wrinkles for itself. But a harp, though a world in itself, is but a narrow world by comparison with the world of a human heart.

Now these thoughts, tinctured subtly with the perfume and coloring of human affections, make up the sum of what merits z«ï ¿§o the name of life; and these in a vast proportion depend for their possibilities of truth upon the degree of approach which the thinker makes to the appropriation of a pure faith. A man is thinking all day long, and putting thoughts into words; he is acting comparatively seldom. But are any man's thoughts brought into conformity with the openings to truth that a faith like the Christian's faith suggests? Far from it. Probably there never was one thought, from the foundation of the earth, that has passed through the mind of man, which did not offer some blemish, some sorrowful shadow of pollution, when it came up for review before a heavenly tribunal; that is, supposing it a thought entangled at all with human interests or human passions. But it is the key in which the thoughts move, that determines the stage of moral advancement.

MANY are the matches which I have had against time in my time and in his time [i. e. in Time's time.] And all such matches, writing or riding, are memorably un

fair. Time, the meagre shadow, carries no weight at all, so what parity can there be in any contest with him? What does he know of anxiety, or liver complaint, or income tax, or of the vexations connected with the correcting of proofs for the press? Although, by the way, he does take upon himself, with his villainous scrawl, to correct all the fair proofs of nature. He sows canker into the heart of rosebuds, and writes wrinkles (which are his odious attempts at pothooks) in the loveliest of female faces. No type so fair, but he fancies, in his miserable conceit, that he can improve it; no stereotope so fixed, but he will alter it; and, having spoiled one generation after another he still persists in believing himself the universal amender and the ally of progress. Ah! that one might, if it were but for one day in a century, be indulged with the sight of Time forced into a personal incarnation, so as be capable of personal insult a cudgelling, for instance, or a ducking in a horse-pond. Or, again, that once in a century, were it but for a single summer's day, his cor- · rected proofs might be liable to supersession by revises, such as I would furnish, down the margin of which should run one perpetual iteration of stet., stet. ;" everything that the hoary scoundrel had deleted, rosebuds or female bloom, beauty or power, grandeur or grace, being solemnly reinstated, and having the privi lege of one day's secular resurrection, like the Arabian phoenix, or any other memento of power in things earthly and in sublunary births, to mock and to defy the scythe of this crowned thief!

MORE truly, and more philosophically, it may be said