R XV. EADING.-No entertainment is so cheap as reading, XVI. REJUDICES AND HABITS.-The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labour on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.-Bolingbroke. XVII. FFECT OF CLIMATE ON OUR DISPOSITIONS.. -There is a sort of variety amongst us which arises from our climate, and the dispositions it naturally produces. We are not only more unlike one another than any nation I know, but we are more unlike ourselves too, at several times, and owe to our very air some ill qualities as well as good. Temple. XVIII. EREDITARY Government. Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must necessarily follow that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights, as they are called, can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.-Burke. XIX. ASENESS OR NOBLENESS OF THE LITERARY CHARACTER. -Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day labour, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.-Schlegel. XX. XCELLENCES OF KNOWLEDGE.-There are in knowledge these two excellences: first, that it offers to every man, the most selfish and the most exalted, his peculiar inducement to good. It says to the former, “Serve mankind, and you serve yourself;" to the latter, “In choosing the best means to secure your own happiness, you will have the sublime inducement of promoting the happiness of mankind." The second excellence of knowledge is that even the selfish man, when he has begun to love virtue from little motives, loses the motive as he increases the love, and at last worships the Deity where before he only coveted the gold upon the altar.—Bulwer. DUCATION.-On this subject, as most others, strange notions have been entertained in the world—that nothing in a mind is better than any thing; or, that if something must be there, that something is better supplied by chance than by design, as if fortune were wisdom's surest. guide. But "nothing" will not keep its hold in any mind. Be it as it may with space, nature endures no vacuum in minds. The mind is a field, in which, so sure as a nan sows B not wheat, so sure will the devil be to sow tares. Another strange notion, if another it may be termed, which has been entertained as if there were a repugnancy between morality and letters- -as if the health of the affections and moral faculties depended, in this rank of life more than any other, upon a morbid state of the intellectual-letters, it has been said, may be an instrument of fraud; so may bread, if discharged from the mouth of a cannon, be an instrument of death.-Bentham. R XXII. ULES FOR CORRECTING CREDULOUS AND CONTRADICTORY DISPOSITIONS. The prejudice of credulity may in some measure be cured by learning to set a high value upon truth, and by taking more pains to attain it, remembering that truth often lies dark and deep, and requires us to dig for it as hid treasure; and that falsehood often puts on a fair disguise, and therefore we should not yield up our judgment to every plausible appearance. It is no part of civility or good breeding to part with truth, but to maintain it with decency and candour.-Watts. XXIII. HARITY.-I fear we little know what a deep and almost terrific sentiment of hatred is often engen dered in the breast of the poor by the ordinary administration of charities. They feel themselves degraded, rather than obliged, by this manner of giving, and become, in fact, enemies of their benefactors. They have their part to play as well as the philanthropist; they consider it a sort of contest between them; and their business is to get all they can, to deceive as much as possible, and to remunerate themselves to the utmost for the unhappy and degraded relation which they sustain to their superiors. This is human nature; and it is only by forgetting what human nature is, that we have been able to overlook this inevitable result. A man is not to be relieved as your horse or your dog may be; it must be done with a sentiment of respect. I would that a new mode of giving were introduced, more accordant with the humanity and gentleness of the Gospel. I would that a man should be pained by having a fellow-being approach him in the humble attitude of a beggar. I would that a flush of ingenuous and sympathising shame should overspread the brow of the giver. Alms are not to be a matter of business; they must not be conferred upon the poor with indifference, or flung to them with contempt.-Dewey. XXIV. ERIODS OF TRANSITION.-A false system, during the period of its undisputed reign, is attended by far less inconvenience than the state of transition to a better order of things. A country is more tranquil, and on the whole more contented, under a despotism than during a revolution. This is a fact on which the short-sighted, easeloving world is very prone to insist, as though present quietness were a better thing than freedom, or truth, or life! That the fact is even as the world represents, we readily grant. The West-Indian slave was lighter of heart thirty years ago than the emancipated negro is to-day; France was more tranquil in the middle of the eighteenth century than 66 amid these struggling aspirations of the nineteenth; the working classes of England were much less troublesome before they suspected themselves to be free men, or while at least they kept to themselves the unwelcome truth, than in these days of chartism and discontent. What then? It is through "much tribulation" that men must always enter the kingdom of heaven," but this strife is surely better than slothful rest in the outer kingdom of darkness! The confusion and the conflict are not the dawn of the coming, but the relic of the parting time. The shorter the struggle, indeed, the better; but sometimes it must of necessity be prolonged. Ages of mistake and wrong are not to be effaced by the penitent efforts of a single day, or a single generation. The sins of the fathers are visited, in perplexity and strife, upon the children. Our consolation must be, that the children's children may hope for peace again, and on a sure foundation.-Green. XXV. HE MORAL EVILS OF WEALTH.-I am obliged to regard with considerable distrust the influence of wealth upon individuals. I know that it is a mere instrument, which may be converted to good or bad ends; but Ï more than doubt whether the chances lead that way. Independence and luxury are not likely to be good for any man. I know that there are noble exceptions; but as I have seen so much of the evil effects of wealth upon the mind-making it proud, haughty, and impatient-robbing it of its simplicity, modesty, and humility-bereaving it of its large and gentle and considerate humanity—and I have heard such testimonies, such |