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ORIGINALITY.

VERY thinker has his own ways of thinking,

and imitation is sure of failure, because in the very nature of things it is an impossibility for one man to be the facsimile of another. Try to be Shakespeare, and you will appear smaller than yourself. He who copies an original writer for the sake of being original, will only succeed in sacrificing his own individuality. He who is content to speak out his own thoughts in his own natural manner cannot fail to be original, in the degree in which he differs essentially from other men ; which is the only legitimate measure of originality.

NOVEL-READING.

ANY people will recollect the time when they

MAN

were emerging from the enchanted twilight regions of The Arabian Nights', The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Jack the Giant-Killer, and were just met, for the first time, by the chill atmosphere of real life-in other words, Latin Grammar and the Rule-of-Three. At that interesting but unhappy period the imagination famishes for want of its accustomed food, and, so surely as it is debarred from wholesome fiction, it will sate its hunger with garbage. Making due allowance for the frailty of humanity, is it not quite possible that much of the schoolboy's prurient curiosity respecting those things which should be known, but which should not become too familiar to the mind, is traceable in some measure to the fact that the imagination, instead of being delicately cultured, is permitted to run wild? If a judicious selection of fiction were made part of the study, not of the boy merely, but of the class, it would keep the imagination occupied, and certainly at least contribute to confine in their proper place those

thoughts and feelings which constitute the special danger of the schoolboy.

But, instead of this, we all know what happens. Woe to the schoolboy who is high-spirited and adventurous, unless he can realize his mother's solicitude for him! Woe indeed to all schoolboys, saving and excepting those happy few, who, being totally devoid of sensibility or imagination, prefer the multiplication-table to Captain Marryat; and those very miserable few whose imagination has been stifled by the hot air of the tract-repository or the conventicle!

There are a thousand chances to one that just because novels are the preserves of his parents or his grown-up sisters, an imaginative schoolboy will poach on the said preserves. If he be caught, he may possibly be flogged, or he may possibly be lectured he will hardly escape a pathetic allusion to the celebrated career of the boy who stole the hornbook, and ended his days upon the gallows.

But, not to waste time in moralizing on the immorality of clandestine novel-reading, let us proceed with the career of our imaginative schoolboy. Watch him at school. He grows absent and preoccupied, while tops and marbles and the amenities of the play-ground become to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. He becomes self-conscious and uneasy. In a few years, trembling on the verge of hobbledehoyhood, and beginning to disport in

the magnificence of coat-tails, the boy has become a sentimentalist. Now, in the name of all that is beautiful and true, is there any more miserable, more pitiable, or more contemptible spectacle in the world than a sentimental boy? A sentimental young gentleman is a sad sight; a sentimental young lady is dangerous; sentimental dowagers and sentimental old maids are frightful (except in the mild eyes of milk-and-water parsons); but a sentimental boy I hold to be intolerable.

Be it observed that I do not imagine that the novels of Marryat, Captain Mayne Reid, or even some of the novels of Kingsley, will make a boy sentimental. Far otherwise. The abuse of these novels is of a very different nature. I have no doubt that they make a boy manly and independent. But I think if we could find out how many boys they have made sailors and soldiers and adventurers, the number would astonish us. The case that I have selected-unhappily, to my certain knowledge, a very common one-is that of the boy who subscribes sixpence a-week to a circulating library, and, with a preternatural intellectual deglutition, swallows down all its contents without digesting any of them. Unless he is gifted with a memory like that of Sir Walter Scott, he has probably spoiled his powers of acquisition for life, and doomed himself to a habit of dreamy vacuity very closely bordering upon imbecility. For his disease

there is no cure except hard struggling in the arena of life.

Then

That very lamentable habit of mind known as sentimentalism, takes a great many different phases, some of which may be traced to early surfeiting on novels. There are some men who are constitutionally sentimental. Of these I say nothing. Then there is the religious sentimentalist, concerning whom it would be bad taste to say much, and of whom, therefore, I shall merely observe that Mr. Chadband, in Dickens's Bleak House, the gentleman who affected widows' houses and buttered-toast, while he eschewed grammar and common-sense, is a not unfavourable specimen of the class. there is the sentimentalist of society-the representative man of this class being the young ensign who aspires desperately to a moustache, who talks pathetically of "deuced fine girls," and kindles into mild seraphic raptures about waltzing and champagne, and other delectable and profitable entertainments. There are other varieties of sentimentalism to be found in a day's walk, but with these I have nothing to do. The sentimentalism produced by injudicious novel-reading is of a different character. Its most tangible effects are to be found in the corners of country newspapers, headed "Select Poetry," and in the waste-paper baskets of the editors of magazines. It consists much in a highly dramatic faculty of identifying oneself altogether with a favourite