In the London "Times" six columns were filled with Lord Dufferin's address at his installation as rector of the University of Aberdeen. The speech was eminently thoughtful, scholarly, and practical; and though it was printed in solid, eye-killing type, we read it with the keenest interest. After this acknowledgment we may be allowed, without being considered a "word-catcher that lives on syllables," to express our surprise at the misuse of the last word in the following passage: "Apart from, and in addition to, whatever may be the professional and obligatory occupations of your lives, you should invent for yourselves an interest or employment as distinct as possible from your usual avocations." What are a man's " avocations?" Are they not, as the etymology of the word shows (a vocatio), the pursuits or amusements which engage his attention when he is "called away from" his regular business or ordinary calling? In the thirteenth volume of the English Dictionary of National Biography, the writer of George Eliot's Life says of her novel, "Romola," that "no one can deny the intellectual powers displayed; but the personages are scarcely alive, except Tito Melema, who is one of her finest feminine characters!" In a New York newspaper it was announced one Saturday that on the next day a certain pastor would “supersede the preaching of Christ in the Baptist Church with a talk about The Ideal Wife."" Some years ago, one Dr. Hunter, an Englishman, published a book of travels, in which he stated that in the island of Malta "the ridges of the houses were flat," and said that "the Orientals never take a walk but on horseback." An English journal recently stated that " a new feature in the social arrangements of the Central Radical Club took place the other evening." When captain Cook's death was announced in England, in 1779, many poetasters wrote elegies on the great navigator, one of which began, "Minerva in heaven disconsolate mourned The loss of her Cook," etc. Some years ago, Dr. Lucius E. Smith, the acute literary critic of the Boston "Watchman,” in a notice of Professor Richardson's recent work on American Literature, pointed out a singular lapsus pennæ: "Not many bards could so confidently say (if I may reverently use the quotation), What I have written I have written."" The words so "reverently" quoted are those of Pontius Pilate. In Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and in his “Gertrude of Wyoming," the tiger is represented as stealing along the banks of Lake Erie, and the panther as domiciled in the woods of Ohio; while the flamingo disports itself in Pennsylvania waters, and the tropical aloe and palm flourish in the same northern latitudes. It is sometimes a faint or shadowy line which separates such lapsus linguæ et pennæ as the foregoing from those daring and designed paradoxes of expression which we find in all great writers, prose or poetical; yet the hearer's or reader's instinct in most cases easily distinguishes between the two classes of expression. Some of the finest lines in poetry owe their charm to these intentional selfcontradictions, as, Milton's "dark with excessive bright," "not light, but darkness visible," and W. W. Story's couplet, "Of every noble work the silent part is best, — Milton's prose, as well as his poetry, abounds in these paradoxes, for which he has the precedent of the best Greek and Roman writers, as when he speaks of certain preachers who "wade out to their auditors, up to their eyebrows in deep shallows that wet not the instep." Keats, in his poem of "The Pot of Basil," thus anticipates the victim's death: "So the two brothers and their murdered man without Regarded literally, this is a gross blunder; but it is a blunder only to a prosaic, matter-of-fact mind. The imaginative reader sees in the lines only "the activity of the imagination darting forward to the murder, 'a ghastly foregone conclusion," " as Leigh Hunt has well called it. Similar to these lines of Keats is the language of Sir Thomas Browne: "In a word, conceive light as invisible, and that is a spirit; " and Job's " a land any day, and where the light is as darkness." Who does not admire Lord Coke's fine paradox, Apices juris non sunt jura, "the highest peaks of the law are not law;" and the still more daring injunction of Scripture, which is only the more impressive by being illogical, "Leave off strife before it be meddled with; " and again, the Psalmist's declaration, “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem before my chief joy"? How forcible are the verbal contradictions of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians vi. 9, 10, and xii. 10; and how pregnant with meaning is his paradoxical exhortation in Philippians ii. 12, 13: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure"! How expressive are the insaniens sapientia, strenua inertia, concordia discors rerum, lene tormentum and dulce periculum of Horace! Of how much of his charm would that fine old fantast Sir Thomas Browne be robbed, were we to expunge from the "Religio Medici" such bold felicities of expression as these: "I fear God, yet am not afraid of him; "The way to be immortal is to die daily; "Sleep is a death whereby we live;""There is no such injury as revenge, and no such revenge as contempt of an injury"! How happily does Molière, in "Les Femmes Savantes," make Chrysale complain, Hisses Silenced. "Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison, 99 66 MOLIÈRE observes that "the impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of wit." It is when such a reply follows an attack, especially a sudden and unexpected attack, that it provokes the highest praise. Nothing is more admirable, nothing more quickly wins our sympathy, than this perfect command and instant concentration of all the faculties when a man is taken at a disadvantage, and has to repel an insinuation or an insult without a moment's warning. Theodore Parker, when interrupted in a platform speech by an insulting query, exclamation, or hiss, was sometimes eminently felicitous in his retort. About forty years ago we heard him make his first anti-slavery speech, at a Garrisonian anti-slavery convention in Faneuil Hall. Having recited, in the course of his speech, which was full of stinging sarcasms, the three items of the creed of Massachusetts regarding the Trinity, he added: "Now, the practical creed is, I believe in the gold eagle almighty; I believe in the silver dollar; I believe in the copper cent, and these three make one money."" A loud hiss from the gallery followed this sarcasm, whereupon, turning to face the hisser, the speaker said: "I have given you your belief in my own language, and you have responded 'Amen'in yours." Not less felicitous was a characteristic mot of that sturdy Baptist preacher Dr. Nathaniel Colver, when officiating as chairman at an anti-slavery meeting one evening in Tremont Temple. One of the speakers having stirred up a tempest of excitement and noise in which hisses were followed by stamps of applause, the doctor stepped forward on the platform and begged his anti-slavery friends to be silent. "Don't you know," said he, "that you might as well try to get the ding out of a shovel by kicking at it, as to try to stamp the hiss out of a goose? 66 Reasons for Or the reasons given for and against marMarrying. riage, it is difficult to say which are the most whimsical. Lord Bacon says that the most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in "certain self-pleasing and humorous minds," which are so sensible of every restraint as almost to think their very garters to be shackles." On the other hand, some men marry because it is the fashion; others, because they don't know what else to do with themselves; others, because they have n't the wit to get a living single; others, because they have "an insane desire to pay some young lady's board." Goethe, the "many-sided," said he married to obtain respectability; Wycherly, in his old age, took his servant |