their coffee or tea, they have learned not only what subjects are agitating the world of politics, theology, science, or letters, but what opinions they ought to hold regarding them. Instead of reacting upon what they read, challenging the assertions made or the conclusions drawn, their minds are mere passive recipients, conduit-pipes through which day after day a stream of news, gossip, jests, and readymade opinions runs, without making a more permanent impression than water upon a waterspout. We believe that newspaper reading, instead of being abortive, may be utilized so as to be of permanent profit. Every good newspaper in the course of a year contains hundreds of valuable articles essays, lectures, disquisitions, poems, extracts from new or old books, reviews, or magazines, etc. - which are of lasting interest, and which should be cut out and preserved in envelopes or scrap-books, for future re-reading or reference. This, we are told, was a practice of the historian Bancroft. A great newspaper reader, he rarely took up one without finding in its columns something which he deemed worthy of preservation; his encyclopædias were immense collections of newspaper articles which had been pasted into his scrap-books under the topics to which they referred. Next to the enjoyment of some sterling classic or an epoch-making book by a modern thinker, we know of no greater pleasure than the reading of such a collection when carefully made. To a writer it is invaluable. Often when he is at a loss for a topic or for ideas, on the verge of mental bankruptcy, every draft made on his brain being protested, - a terse extract into which some thoughtful and suggestive writer has squeezed the results of his maturest experience, observation, and reflec - tion will give a stimulus to the brain that will almost instantly break the ice in which one's ideas are congealed, and make them roll upon paper in a flood. A Deathless WHEN that brilliant orator, Sargent S. Soldier. Prentiss, was a boy at school, he read and re-read Lemprière's Classical Dictionary with such delight that he almost knew it by heart. In after life he used to say that Lemprière was unrivalled as a means of giving interest and effect to a stump speech. When all other illustrations were powerless, he never knew the shirt of Nessus, the labors of Hercules, or the forge of Vulcan to fail in bringing down the house. Like Coleridge's two illustrations, the image of a man sleeping under a manchineal tree and the case of Alexander killing his friend Clitus, which the poet in his youth used as illustrations which Providence had bountifully made inexhaustible in their applications, no emergency could by any possibility arise to puzzle the Mississippi orator, but one of Lemprière's stories would come to the rescue. Do not some preachers hold a similar opinion regarding certain pet illustrations which they have found apt and effective; and is it not about time to pension off, or at least to grant a furlough to, some of the seedy ones that bear the scars of long and honorable service? For example, there is the anecdote of the old soldier of Napoleon, who said to the surgeon who was probing his wound: "Cut deeper, and you'll find the Emperor." The story is a striking one, and serves happily to point a moral; but may not one tire of the aptest illustration if he hear it often, as the partridge-loving French abbé tired of the toujours perdrix at his meals? There was a time when I could hardly hear sermons for two Sundays in succession, without hearing of the old grenadier; he was already an old acquaintance when my pastor introduced him. He (my pastor) went to Europe, and the Rev. Dr. T. preached with much ability in his place. To the doctor's credit be it said. that he preached a considerable number of discourses without once resurrecting my old friend the grenadier; but the inevitable came at last, and I preserved my gravity as well as I could. Then Dr. G., from a neighboring church, supplied our pulpit for a single day; and for the first twenty minutes of his morning discourse I was foolish enough to fancy that I had escaped from the customary illustration; but, lo! the old mustache marched in at last, and with as much formality and stateliness of step as if he had never figured in any pulpit before. How many times I have encountered him in other churches, and in books, newspapers, and magazines, it is needless to say. 66 Qui me délivra des Grecs et Romains?" cried the classic-ridden Frenchman. Who will deliver me from the old grenadier? say I. He clings to me as the old man of the sea clung to Sinbad the sailor. I am as tired of him as Dr. Johnson was of another hackneyed story, when he threatened to knock down any one who should speak to him of the Second Punic War. Parce, precor! brethren of the pulpit. Give us, if you please, Canute and the ocean, the eyeless fish of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the "mills which grind slowly," the Chicago cow and the lamp, the low watershed which divides the raindrops that run ultimately into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from those that run into the Gulf of Mexico, or any other of the exhausted and superannuated veterans of illustration, but let the old grenadier be discharged from service. A Considerate MORALISTS have said a great deal about the "Cabby." danger of judging by appearances, but an incident which occurred some time ago in Paris illustrated it more vividly than the most eloquent homily. The Parisian cab-drivers, it is well known, are the most reckless of reins-handling Jehus. They drive with a loose rein, often letting their horses fall for want of proper care, and pulling now to one, now to the other side of the road, in the most zigzag fashion. Foot-passengers are usually left to shift for themselves, and hence often have hairbreadth escapes from being knocked down. It is said that one day a cab-driver was actually seen pulling back his horse on his haunches to avoid running over a careless pedestrian who was in his way. Credat Judæus Apella! you will exclaim, if you have ever lived in the gay city. But wait. The crowd applauded the unprecedented act, whereupon "cabby" coolly explained that he had already demolished twelve persons that day, and that thirteen being an unlucky number, he had made this desperate effort to keep the list of his victims down to a round dozen! What are We I THINK I am not squeamish about my food. Coming to? Like good Sir Thomas Browne, I am "of a constitution so general, that it comports and sympathizeth with all things." Like that honest knight, too, I "can digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as [one gathered] in a garden." I can eat a fig with not a whit less relish because I know that with a solar microscope I could see crabs and turtles crawling over its surface. Nevertheless, there is a point beyond which my dietetic catholicity does not go; and to be told that my food is saturated with poison is not helpful to digestion. If one is ever disposed to become a pessimist, and to regard life as not worth living, it is when he is told of the adulterations in food that now incessantly menace it, and of the thousand and one other evils which the doctors say may render it miserable or cut it short. Not only is red earth mixed with our cocoa, ground liver and litmus with our coffee, iron sand with our sugar, bisulphuret of mercury or red lead with our cayenne pepper, chromate of lead with our mustard, copper with our pickles, rag-pulp with our butter, old combs with our calf's-foot jelly, — but the very air we breathe is saturated with germs, the water we drink may contain bacteria, the dimes and quarters we handle contain the seeds of zymotic plagues, and the very cat we stroke may have passed from a typhus patient's bedroom to bear on its fur the messenger of death to the next door. "And now we are told," says a London journal, that we smell a Gloire de Dijon, at our peril, and that the azalea in our buttonhole may in the course of an hour impart hay fever to a carriage full of railway travellers." 66 What are we coming to? A few more such revelations, and the days when men could "eat, drink, and be merry' will be looked back upon with wonder and envy. The Antiq- Is there anything new under the sun? Not uity of only are our "modern" discoveries "Shoddy." and 66 original" inventions asserted to be thousands of years old; not only are our jokes, proverbs, metaphors, etc., revivals of others long ago defunct, but even in their rascalities the thoughts of men have run in the same tram-roads. For example, the trickeries of the shoddy " men, so common in our late war, were antici 66 |