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more fitly than in a book of this kind, though, as usual, I am just now violating in the very act of vindicating it.*

The grand Truisms of life only life itself is said to bring to life. We hear them from grandam and nurse, write them in copy-books, but only understand them as years turn up occa

*These oracular Truisms are some of them as impracticable as more elaborate Truths. Who will do "too much" if he knows it is "too much?" "Know thyself" is far easier said than done; and might not a passage like the following make one suppose Shakspeare had Bacon in his eye as the original Polonius, if the dates tallied?

"He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great, nor too small, tasks; for the first will make him dejected by often failures, and the second will make him a small proceeder though by often prevailing. And at the first let him practise with helps, as swimmers do with bladders or rushes; but after a time let him practise with disadvantages, as dancers do with thick shoes. For it breeds perfection if the practice be harder than the use. Where nature is mighty, and therefore the victory hard, the degrees had need be, first, to stay and arrest nature in time: like to him that would say over the four and twenty letters when he was angry; then go less in quantity, as if one should, in forbearing wine, come from drinking healths to a draught at a meal," &c.

If all chance of controlling nature depended on advice like this! What is too great for a man's nature?-what too little? what are bladders, and what thick shoes? when is one to throw off one and take the other? He was a more effectual philosopher who thought of repeating the alphabet when he was angry; though it is not every man who knows when he is that.

sions for practising or experiencing them.

Nay, the longest

and most eventful life scarce suffices to teach us the most important of all. It is Death, says Sir Walter Raleigh, “that puts into a man all the wisdom of the world without saying a word." Only when we have to part with a thing do we feel its value-unless indeed after we have parted with it—a very serious consideration.

When Sir Walter Scott lay dying, he called for his son-inlaw, and while the Tweed murmured through the woods, and a September sun lit up the towers, whose growth he had watched so eagerly, said to him, "Be a good man; only that can comfort when you you come to lie here!" "Be a good man!" To that threadbare Truism shrunk all that gorgeous tapestry of written and real Romance!

"You knew all this," wrote Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, rallying for a little while from his final attack-"You knew all this, and I thought I knew it too: but I know it now with a new conviction."

Perhaps, next to realizing all this in our own lives, (when just too late,) we become most sensible of it in reading the lives and deaths of others, such as Scott's and Johnson's; when we see all the years of life, with all their ambitions, loves, animosities, schemes of action-all the "curas supervacuas, spes inanes, et inexspectatos exitus hujus fugacissimæ vitæ "summed up in a volume or two; and what seemed so long a history to them, but a Winter's Tale to us.

Death itself was no Truism to Adam and Eve, nor to many of their successors, I suppose; nay, some of their very latest descendants, it is said, have doubted if it be an inevitable necessity of life: others, with more probability, whether a man can fully comprehend its inevitableness till life itself be half over; beginning to believe he must Die about the same time he begins to believe he is a Fool.

"As are the leaves on the trees, even so are man's generations ; This is the truest verse ever a poet has sung:

Nevertheless few hearing it hear; Hope, flattering alway, Lives in the bosom of all—reigns in the blood of the Young.”

"And why," says the note-book of one 'nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," "does one day still linger in my memory? I had started one fine October morning on a ramble through the villages that lie beside the Ouse. In high health and cloudless spirits, one regret perhaps hanging upon the horizon of the heart, I walked through Sharnbrook up the hill, and paused by the church on the summit to look about me. The sun shone, the clouds flew, the yellow trees shook in the wind, the river rippled in breadths of light and dark; rooks and daws wheeled and cawed aloft in the changing spaces of blue above the spire; the churchyard all still in the sunshine below."

Old Shallow was not very sensible of Death even when moralizing about old Double's-"Certain, 'tis very certain,

Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all-all shall dieHow good a yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair!"

. Could we but on our journey hear the Truisms of life called out to us, not by Chapone, Cogan, &c., but by such a voice as called out to Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad, when they were about to part in the forest-" Think to doo wel; for the one shall never see the other before the dredeful day of dome!"

Our ancestors were fond of such monitory Truisms inscribed upon dials, clocks, and fronts of buildings; as that of "Time and Tide wait for no man," still to be seen on the Temple sundial; and that still sterner one I have read of, "Go about your business"—not even moralizing upon me. I dare say those who came suddenly and unaware upon the Γνώθι Σεαυτον over the Delphian temple were brought to a stand for a while, some thrown back into themselves by it, others (and those probably much the greater number) seeing nothing at all in it.

The parapet balustrade round the roof of Castle Ashby, in Northamptonshire, is carved into the letters, "NISI DOMINUS CUSTODIAT DOMUM, FRUSTRA VIGILAT QUI CUSTODIT

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EAM. This is not amiss to decipher as you come up the long avenue some summer or autumn day, and to moralize upon afterwards at the little "Rose and Crown" at Yardley, if such good Homebrewed be there as used to be before I knew I was to die.*

"A party of us were looking one autumn afternoon at a country church. Over the western door was a clock with, 'THE HOUR COMETH,'

We move away the grass from a tombstone, itself half buried, to get at any trite memento of mortality, where it preaches more to us than many new volumes of hot-pressed morals. Not but we can feel the warning whisper too, when Jeremy Taylor tells us that one day the bell shall toll, and it shall be asked, “For whom?" and answered, “For us.”

Some of these Truisms come home to us also in the shape of old Proverbs, quickened by wit, fancy, rhyme, alliteration, &c. These have been well defined to be "the Wit of one and the Wisdom of many;" and are in some measure therefore historical indexes of the nation that originates or retains them. Our English Proverbs abound with good sense, energy, and courage, as compactly expressed as may be; making them properly enough the ready money of a people more apt to act than talk. "They drive the nail home in discourse," says Ray, "and clench it with the strongest conviction."

A thoughtful Frenchman says that nearly all which ex

written in gold, upon it. Polonius proceeded to explain, rather lengthily, what a good inscription it was. 'But not very apposite,' said Rosencrantz, seeing the clock has stopped.' The sun was indeed setting, and the hands of the clock, glittering full in his face, pointed up to noon. Osric however, with a slight lisp, said, the inscription was all the more apt, for the hour would come to the clock, instead of the clock following the hour.' On which Horatio, taking out his watch, (which he informed us was just then more correct than the sun,) told us that unless we set off home directly we should be late for dinner. That was one way

of considering an Inscription."

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