it is to have a perfectly good appearance, and that there is no back-come or negative influence which may derange it. "Wheesht! just let us keep calm sough. We must proceed decently. We must walk with circumspection. That business about the Portbrae-I'll just take occasion some night to ca' in by John Richie's, and hear what he says about it, and if he doesna seem to hae any objection, we'll see what may be done. In the meantime, ye may throw yersell in Mr.'s way, and hear his breath. We canna be ower cautious. Dinna gang anes eerand. That would look ower set-like on the business. We'll see about it a', by and by; ay, we'll see about it; just be canny for a awhile, wheesht!"

Or perhaps it is-" That business about the clerkship to the buird: my son John, he's a weel-doing lad. Mr. Jamieson, his late master, just looked upon him as the apple o' his ee. He used to say he could take a voyage to Cheena, and hae an easy mind a' the time, for he was sure that John wad hae everything richt when he cam back. Served a regular apprenticeship to a double-you-ess. Though it's myself that says't, there canna be a candidate better qualifeed. For my ain part, I'm an auld servant o' the toon. In that business, ye ken, o' the brig, I was never aff my feet-lost a gude deal o' my ain business by negleck -and ye ken as weel as ony body hoo muckle fyke I've ha'en wi' the Puir's House, I've just been considering whether John has ony chance. We're anxious to soond our way afore we gang ony farther; for we wadna like to pit in for't and no get it after a'. Ye'll hae a vote? [Here the person addressed intimates many friendly wishes, but is not inclined to give a distinct pledge.] Ou na-we canna expek that, ye ken. It wad neither be richt o' me to ask it, nor for you to gie't. The toon's interest, abune a things! But I just ca'd to let ye ken hoo things stude. I'm by na means anxious for the place to John. But some o' oor freends wad hae us to come forrit, ane we did na like that they should ha' been at sae muckle trouble on oor account, and we fa' back after a'. In the meantime, ye'll say naething till ye hear frae me. We're gaun to be very cautious. We'll feel our way-Wheesht!"

Even to the humblest individuals connected with corporations this system of quietness extends. There is always a kind of valet or man of the corporation's body, who hands about the circulars which call the members together, attends to the decoring, as Caleb Balderstone would call it, of the hall of assembly, and lives in a den hard by, where he "keeps the keys." This man is always found to be a most decided votary of the idea of wheest. He goes noiseless about the place, like a puff of Old Town smoke, and seems absolutely oppressed with a sense of the decency with which it is necessary to conduct "corporation business." Yea, he cannot pronounce the very word "corporation," without that sinking of the voice and interjectional reverence of manner with which certain words of a really sacred nature are

properly uttered in ordinary discourse. He looks upon "the corporation" as the greatest of all public bodies; if the government itself be greater, it is only greater in another way. And the deacon, in his opinion-oh, no man can equal the deacon. "The corporation is very rich. We support twenty-three dekeyed members and eleven windows, and we ha'e a richt to put five callants into the Orphan Hospital. We've our chairter frae James the Sixth; and our record-we've a grand record. It has the Catholic oath at the beginning,-" By my pairt of Paradise" --that ilk member swears to, when he enters. If you wad be very quiet about it, ye micht gang up stairs and sec't. Mak' nae noise, now. Wheesht!"

There is a kindred set of men, who act in something like the same capacity to places of worshipold decent men-squires of the church's body, who come in, as avant-couriers of the minister, to lay down his Bible on the desk, and who evidently are at a great deal of trouble in keeping up a tremendously grave and important aspect, appropriate to their duties. These old men appear in large entailed black coats, which have been in the family for ages, and the skirts of which sweep solemnly by, almost like the mainsheet of a seventy-four. Such persons might be the very doorkeepers of the Court of Silence the high priests of the idea of wheesht. They are immensely impressed with a sense of the greatness of the minister, though, perhaps, he is in reality no conflagrator of the Thames; and their whole form and impression breathes of the solemnity of "the vestry." Anything that an elder says is to them law; and if the minister were to address himself to them, they would feel the honor so deeply, that they would not know what they were about all the rest of the day. When they appear within the body of the church they do not, of course, say anything; but it is evident that they mean a great deal by their anti-disturbance aspect. Children, be all quiet; public worship is just about to commence; it behoves all people to show an outward decency in the house of God. I could give ye a word mysel'; but I leave it to the minister. All I shall say isWheesht!"

Then there is a set of equally peaceable old men, men, who, in the country, act as elders, and stand every Sunday, with a peculiarly mortified and speechless aspect, beside the plate which receives the oblations of the congregation-" grave and reverend seignors," fixed as statues, with their hands thrust into the opposite cuffs of their spencers, and downcast faces that would not smile for untold gold. The boys, and even older people, are almost afraid to pass them, they are so awfully solemn. In one respect they are a kind of fuglemen. The countenances of the worshippers in passing catch from them the contagion of decorum, and instead of the easy, thisworld expression which they sported a few minutes ago, while talking in the churchyard upon such terrane subjects as crops and markets, display in their

pews a gravity appropriate to the place, but which could scarcely have been otherwise assumed. In fact, these old grave men, if planted in the entrance to the cave of Trophonius, would have been sufficient to account for the miracle. During the first prayer they are seen to enter the body of the church, and plant themselves in a seat under the pulpit, with a quietness and solemnity that would not be amiss among the special jurors of Rhadamanthus. If you visit one in his own residence, some evening during the week, you find him sitting in a small lonely room, with a large Bible open before him, into which, as you enter, he quietly thrusts his spectacles for a mark. You almost tremble to disturb so fine a picture of religious contemplation. When he speaks, you find that he has a deep, guttural voice, broken and softened into something inexpressibly smooth and gentle; a constant susurrus of wheesht! If you converse regarding books, you find that, of all secular compositions, he likes Hervey's Meditations, and what he calls Strum's Reflections. The subdued tone of these works harmonize finely with the tranquil pulsations of his soul and heart. On a Sunday afternoon, when the slight bustle which the dismissal of the congregation has made upon the street is all hushed down into the soft and melancholy calm which ever rests that day upon the rural towns of Scotland, if you drop quietly in upon him, you find him sitting in his back room, in the midst of his fami with a stream of rich light from the setting sun fa.ing upon his quiet gray head, and a large Bible displaying its brighter treasures before him. He is reading a chapter to his children in the low, murmuring voice peculiar to him. The whole scene is one of piquant noiselessness and repose; for the children, admirably trained, are all as quiet as doves, and, besides his own voice, there is no sound to be heard, excepting, perhaps, the soft occasional wail of the wind, or the equivocal lull of the distant waterfall. Should one of the young people betray but the slightest mark of restlessness, a glance from the old man, over the top of the spectacles, stills it in an instant. There is something in the scene that seems to say,"Children, let us all be meek and gentle of spiritlet us all be reverent, and lowly, and quiet; let us sit amidst the stillness of the evening hour, and offer up the silent vespers of a grateful and devout spirit -be every worldly and profane thought banishedbe ye holy and calm-wheest!"

There is a set of the generation of quietists, who are ever and anon coming up to you in the street with a curious entre-nous expression of phiz, as if, like a grief-laden ghost, they were possessed of some secret which they could not bring themselves to divulge. Now, for my part, I have no curiosity after

"Have you

standing all I can do to the contrary. heard of anything within the last few days? Anything about? I heard it whispered last night, but I could not believe it. It was talked of to-day, however, I know, in the Parliament House. And Guthry, I'm told, knows all about it. For God's sake, however, don't speak loundly about it; and don't say I told you. It's a very delicate business. Wheesht!" And so, after a thousand insinuations, by whisper, wink, shrug, and smile, they quit button, and leave you weltering in astonishment, unable to make out, for the life of you, what all this means; nay, perhaps, so completely do you feel bamboozled by the tide of new and imperfect ideas which has been let loose upon you, that you scarcely know that you are walking on the earth for five minutes after. You feel ravished away, as it were, into middle air, caput ferit alta sidera-not with elation, but with botheration of spirit. Your imagination toils and pants after their meaning through the great abyss of space; and you hardly feel the pressure of the real world around you for the afternoon.

Then there is a set of people, of the quieter sexgood neighbours, mothers of families, who, when there is any sickness in your own house, and the mistress of the house herself is not very well able to take care of it, rush in unbidden, apparently upon the same instinct which brings birds of prey to fields of battle, and immediately began to assume a strange kind of unauthorized directorate, as if they had been all their lives as familiar with the scene as yourself. These kind persons leave their own houses to Providence, all selfish considerations being abandoned for the time at the call of what they term distress. On coming home to dinner, totally unwitting of the trouble which has befallen the family in your absence, you are surprised in limine, at the very doorstep, by meeting a quiet-looking oldish woman in her stocking-soles, who comes forward, holding up her hand, after the manner of a judge administering an oath, and only pronounces the single emphatic word -wheesht! You are beckoned in a most mysterious manner into a side-room, and told to be very quiet, for has just fallen into a sleep, which the doctor expects to do a great deal of good, and there must, upon no account, be any disturbance. Though the bedroom of the patient is so far away that no voice, however loud, could reach it, this high-priestess of silence still speaks thirty degrees below the zero of articulation, the sense of the necessity of quiet being so weighty upon her mind, that she totally forgets the state of the case in this particular instance, and even, perhaps, if she were removed to the distance of several miles, would still fear to give her words full utterance. You soon find this discreet old lady in full possession of your house, invested with the management of the keys, arbitress of all matters con nected with the children's frocks, and sole autocrat of the bread and butter. If you live in any of the streets of the New Town, where hardly a cart or car

riage is to be heard from morning till night, you iminediately find the street in front of the door strewed with tanners' bark, to deafen the sound of those rarely-occurring annoyances. Of course, if you live in the Old Town, where carts and carriages are incessant, the patient is understood to have nerves accordingly, and no bark is required. Suppose the case to be one where the mistress of the house herself is indisposed; for some time you find your consequence as master entirely absorbed; you are a mere subordinate where once you were principal; the attemtions of all the servants, and also of the discreet lady, are all engrossed by the patient; and you come into, and go out of the house, without ever being heeded or regarded; unless, perhaps, when you happen to make a very leetle noise, and then a troop of harpies, with the discreet lady at their head, fly upon you, with open mouth and uplifted hands, and all the gesticulation and expression which might properly accompany an outburst of indignant remonstrance, but which, in this case, is a kind of dumb thunder, ending all in the awful monosyllable-wheest! Then, there is an oiling of doors, and a throng of women going through the house in their stockings, or at most in what are called carpet shoes, and a whispering and breathing of wheest! for many days, till at last, through very contagion, you yourself become as timid as a titmouse, and almost forget the sound of your own voice. Then the mysterious old woman, how beautifully she manages everything. Her outgoings and her in-comings are all most becoming and composed. The flame which you see her occasionally sending over a plateful of brandy for the sickroom, is not more gently lambent than her own pace. You see her a few yards off addressing herself to some underling, and, although you hear not a whisper nor a breath, except, perhaps, the ever interjected wheesht, to your surprise her language appears to be comprehended by the person spoken to, and lo and behold it is immediately acted upon. The very children, albeit unaccustomed to the reign of silence, are overborne and dashed down by the awful influence of the everlasting wheesht, and are observed crawling, like so many kittens, through a suite of apartments, where they erst performed gallopades of the most outrageous description. If you happen to take a peep into the sick-chamber, you see the mysterious woman standing over the bed, with the air and gestures of an inspired Pythoness, pointing to distant bottles and boxes, and doing everything, speech excepted, to make herself understood. If the wrong bottle or box be touched by the servant, she writhes her whole body and countenance in an agony of dumb negation; but, when the right one is pounced upon at last, she suddenly relaxes into approval, and her agonies cease. Suppose that the patient at last "departs," the stillness of the household is not remitted, in consideration of their being no longer any one to be disturbed. It rather becomes more deep and solemn than ever. There is still the same

carpet-shoeing as before-the same ejaculating of wheesht. The house begins to look like an absolute sepulchre, and the mysterious woman, like some marble and unspeaking cherub, planted to guard it. She takes a leading hand in the melancholy duties paid to the dead, and is always able to recommend a person who makes grave-clothes-Mrs. So-and-soliving in some close in the Old Town, first stair, fifth door up. She can even do something in the way of mournings for the survivors; the children will require this, and the servants that; so much crape for this one's hat; so much black ribbon for that one's bonnet. Even after all these matters have been arranged by her friendly intervention, she does not yet depart. She must see after the wine and cake at the funeral, and take care that everything is managed with decency, and above all things, quietly. At last, when all is over, she soofs out at the door, with a strange rustle of silk, as if she were saying, and saying for the last farewell time, the oft-repeated shibboleth of her kind-WHEESHT!

THE SANCTITY OF HOME. JOHN RUSKIN-"SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE." I can not but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which can not be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins; and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honorably, they would be grieved at the close of them to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering,- that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon -was, to be swept away as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that all they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this: and that, far more, a good son, a noble descend. ant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, and a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our father's honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little

revolution of his own life only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up in mildewed forwardness out of the kneaded fields about our capital-upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone-upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar-not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gypsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true universality of the Christian worship, which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight it is no question or intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy. how and with what aspect of durability and of completeness the domestic buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement than their attainments at the termination of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their children what

they had been, and from what, if so it had been permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and which investą with the dignity of contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.

I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-possession, this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities depends, not on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite decoration of even the smallest tenements, of their proud periods. The most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground-floor with two stories above, three windows in the first and two in the second. Many of the most exquisite buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger dimen. sions. One of the most interesting pieces of fifteenth century architecture in North Italy is a small house in a back street behind the market-place of Vicenza, It bears date 1481, and the motto, Il. n'est. rose, sans epine; it has also only a ground-floor and two stories, with three windows in each, separated by rich flower work and with balconies, supported, the central one by an eagle with open wings, the lateral ones by winged griffins standing on cornucopiæ. The idea that a house must be large in order to be well built, is altogether of modern growth, and is parallel with the idea that no picture can be historical except of a size admitting figures larger than life.

I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within and without; with what degree of likeness to each other in style and manner I will say under another head; but, at all events, with such differences as might suit and express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history. This right over the house, I conceive to, belongs to its first builder, and is to be respected by his children; and it would be well that blank stones should be left in places, to be inscribed with a summary of his life and its experience, raising thus the habitation into a kind of a monument; and developing, into more systematic instructiveness, that good custom which was of old universal, and which still remains among some of the Swiss and Germans, of acknowledging the grace of God's per. mission to build and possess a quiet resting-place.

AUTHORS' THOUGHTS.-If the secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!—Thackeray.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR.

ADAM SMITH-" WEALTH OF NATIONS." Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people, of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woolen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the woolcomber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others, who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine in the same manner all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchengrate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him, perhaps, by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed

in producing those different conveniences; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what & variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that, without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

THE ORIGIN OF PROPERTY.

WILLIAM PALEY-“MORAL PHILOSOPHY."

If you should see a flock of pigeons in a field of corn, and if—instead of each picking where and what it liked, taking just as much as it wanted, and no more-you should see ninety-nine of them gathering all they got into a heap, reserving nothing for themselves but the chaff and the refuse, keeping this heap for one, and that the weakest, perhaps the worst pigeon of the flock; sitting round, and looking on all the winter, whilst this one was devouring, throwing about, and wasting it; and if a pigeon, more hardy or hungry than the rest, touched a grain of the hoard, all the others instantly flying upon it and tearing it to pieces; if you should see this, you would see nothing more than what is every day practiced and estab lished among men. Among men you see the ninetyand-nine toiling and scraping together a heap of superfluities for one, and this one, too, oftentimes, the feeblest and worst of the whole set-a child, a woman, a madman, or a fool-getting nothing for themselves all the while but a little of the coarsest of the provision which their own industry produces; looking quietly on while they see the fruits of all their labour spent or spoiled; and if one of the number take or touch a particle of the hoard, the others joining against him, and hanging him for the theft.

There must be some very important advantages to account for an institution which, in the view of it above given, is so paradoxical and unnatural.

The principal of these advantages are the follow. ing:

1. It increases the produce of the earth.

The earth, in climates like ours, produces little without cultivation; and none would be found will ing to cultivate the ground, if others were to be admitted to an equal share of the produce. The same is true of the care of flocks and herds of tame animals.

Crabs and acorns, red deer, rabbits, game, and fish.