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Sneer. Why, that's true,-and that attack now on you the other day

Sir F. What? where?

Dan. Ay, you mean in a paper of Thursday; it was completely ill-natured, to be sure.

Sir F. O, so much the better-Ha! ha ha!-I wouldn't have it otherwise.

Dan. Certainly, it's only to be laughed at; for-

Sir F. You dōn't happen to recollect what the follɔ̃w said, do you?

Sneer. Pray, Dangle-Sir Fretful seems a little anxious

Sir F. O no!-anxious,—not I,--not the least. I But one may as well hear, you know.

Dan. Sneer, do you recollect?—[Aside to SNEER.] Make out something.

Sneer. [Aside to DANGLE.] I will. [Aloud.] Yes, yes, I remember perfectly.

Sir F. Well, and pray now-not that it signifies--what might the gentleman say?

Sheer. Why, he roundly asserts that you have not the slightest invention or original genius whatever; though you are the greatest traducer of all other authors living.

Sir F. Ha! ha! ha! Věry good!

Sneer. That, as to comedy, you have not one idea of your own, he believes, even in your commonplace-book, where stray jokes and pilfered witticisms are kept with as much method as the ledger of the Lost and Stolen Office.

Sir F. Ha! ha! ha! Very pleasant!

Sneer. Nay, that you are so unlucky as not to have the skill even to steal with taste: but that you glean from the ref'use of obscure volumes, where mōre judicious plagiärists have been before you; so that the body of your work is a composition of dregs and sediments,—like a bad tavern's worst wine.

Sir F. Ha! ha!

Sneer. In your more serious efforts, he says, your bombast (bum'bast) would be less intolerable, if the thoughts were ever suited to the expression; but the homeliness of the sentiment stares through the fantastic encumbrance of its fine language, like a clown in one of the new uniforms!

Sir F. Ha! ha!

Sneer. That your occasional tropes and flowers suit the gereral coarseness of your style, as tambour sprigs would a ground of linsey-wolsey; while your imitations of Shakspeare resemble the mimicry of Falstaff's Page, and are about as near the standard of the original.

Sir F. Ha!

Sneer. In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; so that they lie on the surface like lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize!

Sir F. [After great agitation.] Now, another person would be vexed at this.

Sneer. Oh! but I wouldn't have told you, only to divert' you. Sir F. I know it—I am diverted-Ha! ha! ha!—not the least invention!-Ha! ha! ha! věry good! very good!

Sneer. Yes-no genius! Ha! ha! ha!

Dan. A severe rogue! ha! ha! But you are quite right, Sir Fretful, never to read such nonsense. You are quite right.

Sir F. To be sure-for, if there is anything to one's praise, it is a foolish vanity to be gratified at it; and if it is abuse,— why, one is always sure to hear of it from one good-natured friend or another! R. B. SHERIDAN.

TH

SECTION XII.

I.

61. ANCIENT AND MODERN WRITERS.

HE classics possess a peculiar charm, from the circumstance that they have been the modèls, I might almost say the masters, of composition and thought in all ages. In the contemplation of these august teachers of mankind, we are filled with conflicting emotions.

2. They are the early voice of the world, better remembered and more cherished still than all the intermediate words that have been uttered; as the lessons of childhood still haunt us when the impressions of later years have been effaced from the

mind. But they show with most unwelcome frequency the tokens of the world's childhood, before passion had yielded to the sway of reason and the affections. They want the highest charm of purity, of righteousness, of elevated sentiments, of love to God and man.

3. It is not in the frigid philosophy of the Pōrch and the Academy that we are to seek these; not in the marvelous teachings of Socratès,' as they come mended by the mellifluous words of Plato; not in the resounding line of Homer, on whose inspiring tale of blood Alexander' pillowed his head; not in the animated strain of Pindar,' where virtue is pictured in the successful strife of an ǎth'lēte' at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenès, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully," not in the geniäl libertinism of Horace,' or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No: these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek the way of life.

4. For eighteen hundred years the spirit of these writers has been engaged in weaponlèss contest with the Sermon on the Mount, and those two sublime commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. The strife is still pending. Heathenism, which has possessed itself of such siren forms, is not yet exorcised. It still tempts the young, controls the affairs of active life, and haunts the meditations of age.

5. Our own productions, though they may yield to those of the ancients in the arrangement of ideas, in method, in beauty

1 Sŏc'ra tes, an illustrious Grecian philosopher and teacher of youth, was born at Athens, in the year 468 B. C. Though the best of all the men of his time, and one of the wisest and most just of all men, he unjustly suffered the punishment of death for impiety, at the age of seventy.

2 Mel lĭflu ous, flowing with honey; sweetly flowing; smooth.

'Alexander the Great, son of Philip, king of Macedonia, one of the States of Greece, was born in the autumn, B. C. 356. He made so many conquests that he was styled the Conqueror of the World. He died

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of form, and in freshness of illustration, are immeasurably superior in the truth, delicacy, and elevation of their sentiments; above all, in the benign recognition of that great Christian revelation, the brotherhood of man. How vain are eloquence and poëtry, compared with this heaven-descended truth! Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale, as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thickwarbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than the music of the human heart.

SUMNER.

CHARLES SUMNER, son of Charles Pinckney Sumner, sheriff of Suffolk, Massachusetts, was born in Boston, 1811. He is widely known for the extent of his legal knowledge and general attainments. As an orator and writer, he stands deservedly high. His style is rapid and energetic, with much fullness of thought and illustration. He has a great deal of enthusiasm and courage, as is shown by his discourse on the "True Grandeur of Nations." On the death of Judge Story, in 1845, he was offered the vacant seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, which honor he persisted in declining. He was elected to the Senate of the United States in 1851, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Daniel Webster, and still retains that position (1866).

S

II.

62. LANGUAGE.

OME words on Language may be well applied;

And take them kindly, though they touch your pride:
Words lead to things; a scale is more precise,—

Coarse speech, bad grammar, swearing, drinking, vice.
Our cold Northeaster's icy fetter clips

The native freedom of the Saxon lips :

See the brown peasant of the plastic South,
How all his passions play about his mouth!
With us, the feature that transmits the soul,
A frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.

2. The crampy shackles of the ploughboy's walk
Tie the small muscles, when he strives to talk ;
Not all the pumice of the polished town

Can smooth this roughness of the barnyard down
Rich, honored, titled, he betrays his race
By this one mark-he's awkward in the face ;—

Nature's rude impress, long before he knew
The sunny street that holds the sifted few.

3. It can't be helped, though, if we're taken young,
We gain some freedom of the lips and tongue;
But school and college often try in vain
To break the padlock of our boyhood's chain:
One stubborn word will prove this axiom true—
No late-caught rustic can enunciate view (vū).
4. A few brief stanzas may be well employed
To speak of errors we can all avoid.
Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope
The careless churl that speaks of soap for soap:
Her edict exiles from her fair abode

The clownish voice that utters road for road,
Less stern to him who calls his coat a coat,
And steers his boat believing it a boat,
She pardoned one, our classic city's boast,
Who said, at Cambridge, most instead of most;
But knit her brows, and stamped her angry foot,
To hear a teacher call a root' a root."

5. Once mōre: speak clearly, if you speak at all;
Carve every
word before you let it fall;
Don't, like a lecturer or dramatic star,
Try over hard to roll the British R ;

Do put your accents in the proper spot;

Don't let me beg you-don't say "How?" for "What?"
And, when you stick on conversation's burrs,

Don't strew the pathway with those dreadful urs.' HOLMES. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, son of the late Abiel Holmes, D.D., was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 29th of August, 1809. He received his early education at Phillips Exeter Academy, and entered Harvard University in 1825. On being graduated, after a year's application to the study of law, he relinquished it, and devoted himself with ardor and industry to the pursuit of medicine. He visited Europe in the spring of 1833, principally residing at Paris while abroad, where he attended the hospitals, became personally acquainted with many of

* Root, (råt). 2 Root, (rût).

Urs, the drawling style in which many persons are in the habit of talking, heedlessly hesitating to think cf a word, and the meanwhile sup

plying its place by the unmeaning syllable "ur," is here happily condemned. Such habits may easily be corrected by a little presence of mind, or by following the direction, Think twice before you speak once.

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