Was added to the troubles of a time
Laden, for them and all of their degree,
With care and sorrow: shoals of artisans
From ill-requited labour turned adrift
Sought daily bread from public charity,
They, and their wives and children-happier far
Could they have lived as do the little birds
That peck along the hedge-rows, or the kite
That makes her dwelling on the mountain rocks

A sad reverse it was for him who long
Had filled with plenty, and possessed in peace
This lonely Cottage. At the door he stood,
And whistled many a snatch of merry tunes
That had no mirth in them; or with his knife
Carved uncouth figues on the heads of sticks-
Then, not less idly, sought, through every nook
In house or garden, any casual work
Of use or ornament; and with a strange,
Amusing, yet uneasy, novelty,

He mingled where he might, the various tasks
Of summer, autumn, winter, and of spring.
But this endured not; his good humour soon
Became a weight in which no pleasure was:
And poverty brought on a petted mood
And a sore temper: day by day he drooped,
And he would leave his work-and to the town,
Would turn, without an errand, his slack steps;
Or wander here and there among the fields.
One while he would speak lightly of his babes,
And with a cruel tongue: at other times
He tossed them with a false unnatural joy:
And 'twas a rueful thing to see the looks
Of the poor innocent children. 'Every smile,'
Said Margaret to me, beneath these trees,
'Made my heart bleed.'

While thus it fared with them,
To whom this cottage, till those hapless years,
Had been a blessed home, it was my chance
To travel in a country far remote;

And when these lofty elms once more appeared,
What pleasant expectations lured me on

O'er the flat Common !-With quick step I reached
The threshold, lifted with light hand the latch;
But, when I entered, Margaret looked at me
A little while; then turned her head away
Speechless, and, sitting down upon a chair,
Wept bitterly. I wist not what to do,

Nor how to speak to her. Poor wretch! at last
She rose from off her seat, and then,-O Sir!
I cannot tell how she pronounced my name:-
With fervent love, and with a face of grief
Unutterably helpless, and a look

That seemed to cling upon me, she enquired
If I had seen her husband. As she spake,
A strange surprise and fear came to my heart,
Nor had I power to answer ere she told

That he had disappeared-not two months gone.

He left his house: two wretched days had past,
And on the third, as wistfully she raised
Her head from off her pillow, to look forth,
Like one in trouble, for returning light,
Within her chamber-casement she espied
A folded paper, lying as if placed

To meet her waking eyes. This tremblingly
She opened-found no writing, but beheld
Pieces of money carefully enclosed,

Silver and gold. I shuddered at the sight,'
Said Margaret, for I knew it was his hand
That must have placed it there; and ere that day
Was ended, that long anxious day, I learned
From one who by my husband had been sent
With the sad news, that he had joined a troop
Of soldiers, going to a distant land.

He left me thus he could not gather heart
To take a farewell of me; for he feared
That I should follow with my babes, and sink
Beneath the misery of that wandering life."

[To be continued.]

Wordsworth.

THE LIFE OF ROUSSEAU,

TAKEN PRINCIPALLY FROM HIS OWN CONFESSIONS."

JOHN JAMES ROUSSEAU, born at Geneva, in 1712, was the son of a watchmaker of that city. Before he was seven years old, his father, to improve him in reading, would read romances with him, in which they would become so interested, that they alternately read whole nights together. At the usual age he was apprenticed to a watch-case-engraver, but seems to have neglected his business. His great delight was in reading. In less than a-year he had exhausted the scanty library within his reach: he then amused himself by recalling to mind the various situations in the books he had read, and applying them to himself; living, as it were, in an ideal world. At length, weary of his situation and the severity of his master, he ran away from his servitude. After rambling some days in the environs of Geneva, a proselyting priest sent him to Annecy, to Madame de Warrens, a new convert to Catholicism. Thence he was recommended to a convent at Turin, where he was driven into the bosom of the Catholic church, and then turned adrift upon the world. He was now about seventeen. After serving as footman in two families, he resought Madame de Warrens, who received him into her house, more as a son than a servant. He now studied Latin and music: the first to very little purpose. At the age of twenty he obtained the employment of registering land for the King of Sardinia, but, at the end of two years, threw it up to teach singing. It was now that a closer connection commenced between him and Madame de Warrens, the advances being made by her, to save him from the arts of two or three designing women. 1738, his health being in a very wretched state, he visited Montpellier; and on his return found a new favourite established at Madame de Warrens' From that moment he no longer saw this beloved woman but with the eyes of a real son. After losing a year as tutor in a family, he returned to her; but soon left her to seek his fortune in Paris, where he arrived in 1741, with fifteen louis in his purse, his comedy of Narcissus, and his "project"-a new method of noting music. His project, though unsuccessful, procured him the society of the most distinguished men in Paris. Soon after he obtained the

In

office of secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, where he was very generally esteemed, but was compelled to resign at the end of eighteen months, the ambassador being jealous of his talents and probity. He returned to Paris, and united himself to Thérèsa le Vasseur, a young girl poor but respectable, who lived with him till his death, but whom he did not marry till 1769. She had five children by him, all of whom were sent to the Foundling Hospital, as he had not the means of supporting them, and believed they would be taken better care of there. In 1749, he wrote a paper "On the effects of cultivating the Arts and Sciences," which gained the prize at the Academy of Dijon. In 1752, his opera of the "Village Conjuror" brought him completely into vogue. In the midst of his popularity, he gave up his laced clothes and sword, declined visiting, and determined to lead a life free from the caprices of others, depending only upon himself, and earning his subsistence by copying music. Of course he met with opposition from every body. Next year he wrote his essay "On the Inequality of Mankind," which he published in 1754, after visiting Geneva, where he re-entered the Protestant church. In the following spring he went to reside at a little Hermitage near the forest of Montmorency. Here, resigning himself to continual reveries, in the midst of a beautiful country, at the age of forty-three, he sketched the plan of the "New Eloisa." Here he had a visit from the Countess de Houdetot, with whom he had been slightly acquainted at Paris. She had been married very young, against her inclinations, and was at this time attached to one St. Lambert: the manners of the age allowing this freedom. Rousseau became enamoured of her. For the only time in his life, he was really in love. She resided about a league from the Hermitage. Almost every day for three months, Rousseau met her. Love was equal, but not reciprocal. Both were intoxicated with the passion: she for St. Lambert-Rousseau for her, yet loving her too well to wish to possess her at the price of her honour. It was not long before they were parted by the intrigues of self-called friends, who continually annoyed him, feeling their own lives rebuked by his singularity. In 1758, he finished the Eloisa; but it was not published till the end of 1760. The "Social Contract" and "Emilius" appeared in 1762. He was immediately assailed on all sides, and being threatened with arrest, quitted France for Geneva. On his way he wrote the "Levite of Ephraim," a poem. The Emilius was burned at Geneva; and nine days after the order of arrest was issued at Paris, another was determined on by the Swiss Republic. Rousseau took refuge at Motiers, in Neufchatel, in the dominions of Frederic of Prussia, who readily gave him an asylum. Here he assumed the Armenian habit, being subject to continual attacks of a cruel disorder; and, giving up literature, sought the repose of a quiet life. New cabals were raised against him; the clergy and his enemies excited the common people to such an extent that he was hooted and pelted in his walks, and even had his house attacked; and, after a residence of two years and a half, he was driven from Motiers to the little island of St. Peters, belonging to the Canton of Berne, where he gave himself up to botany, but was scarcely settled, when he was ordered to quit the territory of the republic in twenty-four hours. He retired to Strasburgh; and thence proceeded to Paris, where he met Hume; and accompanied him to England in 1766; but returned to France the next year, and published his 66 Dictionary of Music." In 1770, notwithstanding the order of arrest, he re-appeared in Paris, where, allowed to remain on condition of not writing, he resided quietly, though in great popularity, till 1777, when he retired to Ermenonville (ten leagues from Paris), where he died of apoplexy, July 2, 1778. The following epitaph is on his tomb at Ermenonville.

HERE RESTS THE MAN OF NATURE AND OF TRUTH.

The Justice of Love.-A just man hateth the evil, but not the evil doer.

Sir Philip Sydney.

LIFE'S DEFILEMENT.

I STOOD in one of those tremendous chasms
That sepulchre the Agonies of Time;

And, watching there, beheld a Thing of spasms
And fitful breath, a Mystery sublime,
With features tear-worn yet symmetrical,
Like to man's Life, which horribly did wed
Corruption, mingling till long use did pall
Its monstrous lewdness:-I have witnessed
On the Enthusiast's lips the venomous slime
Of earthy forms; and heard the cold blank laugh
Of the fond poet mock the Miseries

Whose frenzied curse thorn-wreathed his holy head.
The many Woes from their lorn tombs arise,
And in my grey heart dig their wordless epitaph.

THE LICENSED.

ADOWN the hallowed stairs, in quiet state
Moveth, unostentatiously elate,

The bridal pageantry: The rite is done;

And now in the eye of Law the twain are one.
From the love-stricken maiden's passioned look,
The divine joy there throned gloriously
Poureth the utterance of a deep rebuke,
Fronting that ceremonial mockery:

Was not she wed by her great Love before?
O God! it is a grievous tyranny

When empty form thus mines in the very core
Of natural affection's purity!

The crawling Custom dwelleth in the gate
Of our poor Being's dearest sanctity.

Z.

A degenerate Noble is like a turnip, there is nothing good of him but that which is under-ground, or rhubarb, a contemptible shrub that springs from a noble root. He has no more title to the worth or virtue of his ancestors, than the worms that were engendered in their dead bodies, and yet he believes he has enough to exempt himself and his posterity from all things of that nature for ever. This makes him glory in the antiquity of his family, as if his nobility were the better the further off it is in time as well as desert from that of his predecessors. He supposes the empty title of honour sufficient to serve his turn, though he has spent the substance and reality of it,like the fellow who sold his ass, but would not part with the shadow of it,— or like Apicius, that sold his house and kept the balcony to see and be seen in. And because he is privileged from being arrested for his debts, supposes he has the same freedom from all obligations he owes humanity and his country, because he is not punishable for his ignorance and want of honour, no more than poverty or unskilfulness is in other professions, which the law supposes to be punishment enough in itself: he is like a fanatic, that contents himself with the mere title of a saint, and makes that a privilege to act all manner of wickedness; or like the ruins of a noble structure, of which there is nothing left but the foundation, and that obscured and buried under the rubbish of the superstructure. The living honour of his ancestors is long ago

departed dead and gone, and his but the ghost and shadow of it that haunts the house where it once lived, with horror and disquiet. His nobility is truly descended from the glory of his fathers, and may be rightly said to fall to him, for it will never rise again by his means to the height it was in them; and he succeeds them as candles do the office of the sun. The confidence of nobility has rendered him ignoble, as the opinion of wealth makes some men poor: and as those who are born to estates neglect industry and have no business but to spend, so he, being born to honour, believes he is no further concerned than to consume and waste it. He is but a copy, and so ill done, that there is no line of the original in him, but the sin only. He is like a word that by ill custom and mistake has utterly lost the sense of that from which it was derived, and now signifies quite the contrary, for the glory of noble ancestors will not permit the good or bad of their posterity to be obscure. He values himself only upon his title,-which, being only verbal, gives him a wrong account of his natural capacity; for the same words signify more or less according as they are applied to things,-as ordinary and extraordinary do at court; and sometimes the greater sound has the less sense, as in accompts though four be more than three, yet a third in proportion is more than a fourth.-Butler (the author of Hudibras), 1660.

The People.-It is the people which composes the human species. All which is not the people is of so little consequence that it is not worth the trouble of counting.-Rousseau.

Virtue is the only nobility.-Seneca.

Thinking justly.—If we only think justly, we shall always easily foil all the advocates of tyranny.-Hazlitt.

REASONING.

BESIDES the want of determined ideas, and of sagacity and exercise in finding out and laying in order intermediate ideas, there are three miscarriages that men are guilty of in reference to their reason, whereby this faculty is hindered in them from that service it might do and was designed for. And he that reflects upon the actions and discourses of mankind, will find their defects in this kind very frequent, and very observable.

1. The first is of those who seldom reason at all, but do and think according to the example of others, whether parents, neighbours, ministers, or whom else they are pleased to make choice of to have an implicit faith in, for the saving of themselves the pains and trouble of thinking and examining for themselves. 2. The second is of those who put passion in the place of reason, and being resolved that shall govern their actions, and arguments, neither use their own nor hearken to other people's reason, any farther than it suits their humour, interest or party; and these one may observe commonly content themselves with words that have no distinct ideas to them, though, in other matters, that they come with an unbiassed indifferency to, they want not abilities to talk and hear reason, where they have no secret inclination that hinders them from being tractable to it.

3. The third sort is of those who readily and sincerely follow reason, but for want of having that which one may call farge, sound, round-about sense, have not a full view of all that relates to the question, and may be of moment to decide it. We are all but short-sighted, and very often see but one side of the matter: our views are not extended to all that has a connection with it. From