subject without long-continued brooding over it, and ability to converse intelligently on it by skimming over its surface. They will declare that iteration is the secret of tenacious recollection, and that what is acquired hastily as hastily disappears. They will affirm with Pestalozzi, that "thinking only leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn, whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases; he will never know anything of it except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he has made the property of his mind." But who in these days of fast travel and fast living of lightning express-trains, electric cars, and ocean greyhounds—of tunnels and shortcuts - cares for the opinions of a passé educator, who lived in the slow-coach times of a century ago?

Advancing WHEN Parry, the Arctic navigator, sought Backward. to reach the Pole with his pack of dogs, sledges and dogs apparently went forward. When, however, the sun broke through the mist, and the latitudes could be ascertained, it was found, to the astonishment of the party, that, without being aware of it, they had actually gone several degrees backward. The ground on which they had moved forward was a detached field of ice, carried south by the current. Does not this incident remind one of some of the "advanced thinkers" of our day? While priding themselves upon their progress, how often would they find, if they could learn their actual situation, that they have been actually advancing backward in other words, instead of discovering new objections to Christianity or to its cardinal doctrines, they have unconsciously gone back a century or centuries, and are actually repeating, without the slightest suspicion of the fact, the old exploded

arguments of Toland, Celsus, and other freethinkers who lived a century or centuries ago!

Sensible ARCHDEACON HARE expresses the opinion in Nonsense. that unique book "Guesses at Truth," that, as the next best thing to a very good joke is a very bad one, so the next best thing to a very good argument is one that is very bad. In both cases the extremes meet. The exquisitely good and the deplorably bad are each commendable; it is only mediocrity which is "tolerable," and, therefore, not to be endured."

For example, an Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosted him with this question: "Prithee, is that thy own hare, or a wig? It is impossible to excuse this, and it is impossible to help being tickled by it. Its very lameness-the limping in one leg which would provoke the scorn of a carping, laughter-proof critic, constitutes its beauty. So also in argument, the selfsame result which a fine piece of logic accomplishes regularly by square, rule, and compass, is now and then reached by its misshapen brethren per saltum, as a piece of luck. Could any syllogism in mood and figure be more convincing than the peasant's logic: good it was of God to put Sunday at one end of the week, for if He had put it in the middle He would have made a broken week of it!" Hardly less admirable was the reasoning of the Capuchin monk, who called upon his congregation to be especially thankful that Providence had mercifully placed death at the end of life, and not in the middle, so that we might all have time to prepare for it." Again, who does not yield to the irresistible, though comical, reasoning of the tenant of a leaky house, who was

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asked, during a heavy rainstorm, why he did not have it reshingled. "Because it is raining," he replied. "But why not repair the roof during the pleasant weather?" "Because there is no need of it then." Some of the finest lines in literature are those that thus limp in their logic, indeed, are absolute paradoxes; as when Story sings,

"Of every noble work the silent part is best;

Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed;

or when Milton, not afraid of a double paradox, portrays certain pompous but shallow preachers of his time as "wading out to their auditors, up to their eyebrows in deep shallows that wet not the instep." Shakespeare's dogmatic friend, Ben Jonson, asserted that when the former made Cæsar say,

"Cæsar never did wrong without just cause,"

the great dramatist made "the foremost man of all the world" utter nonsense; and such it might be, falling from another man's lips. But could anything else so fully express the mighty self-centred ambition, the enormous selfreliance of the man, as this assumption that Cæsar's needs had power to change the moral aspect of things; so that an act which done by another would be wrong, would, if performed by him, thereby get an impress of right?

"Phoebus,

A PERSON in Webster, Mass., advertises in What a the Boston Herald" for sale or rent, fortyName!" three acres of "valuable real estate" in the first-named town, "bounded on the east by Chargoggagoggmanchanggagoggagungamaugg Lake," which, we are told, "has become a favorite summer resort" of New Yorkers and others.

What a charming name that lake has! It is formed from nine different letters only, yet numbers thirty-eight, including repetitions. Who would not covet a rural home by a sheet of water with such a musical and expressive appellation, especially if the lake is as long as its name? Ilow different from the "four sneezes of a Russian name," which bristles with consonants enough, De Quincey says, to splinter the teeth of a crocodile. How superior in euphony this Indian tongue to the Mexican, in which "I love you is ni-mitstskikawaka-tlasolta, and a kiss is tetennamiguilitzli! As a French writer who states this fact declares, "quand on a prononcé le mot, on a bien mérité la chose."

The Plague A TRAVELLER in Italy, who many years ago of Satiety. had gone the rounds of its public and private picture-galleries, complained in his journal - the wellknown "Diary of an Invalid "that, exquisite as was the enjoyment they yielded, they began at last to pall on the taste. After feasting his imagination in the galleries of Florence and Rome with the masterpieces of the pencil, he found that it required extraordinary excellence to stimulate his languid attention, and satisfy the increasing fastidiousness of his taste. Even famed paintings of Titian and Correggio detained him less than they deserved.

What a cruel deduction is this from the enjoyment which we expect to derive from familiarity with excellence and from increase of knowledge! Of course, in regard to merely sensual gratification, we know perfectly well that a time must come at last when the senses are sated, when the keen edge of the sensibilities is blunted, when the happiness ceases to satisfy, and the pleasures lose the power of pleasing. Wilberforce, in speaking of the Richmond villa

of the Duke of Queensbury, whose personal property exceeded a million pounds, gives a vivid illustration of this : "I always observe that the owners of your grand houses have some snug corner in which they are glad to shelter themselves from their own magnificence." He adds that when a young man he once dined with the Duke, at his villa, along with a party of celebrated guests. "The dinner was sumptuous, the views from the villa quite enchanting, and the Thames was in all its glory; but the Duke looked on with indifference. 'What is there,' he said, to make so much of in the Thames? I am quite tired of it; there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same.'"

We can easily understand why the glorious scene was a sealed book to the worn voluptuary, why his spirit's eye was blind to it, and that the full enjoyment of natural beauty is reserved for men of nobler minds and purer lives. But is it not a sad reflection that often even the latter grow less happy as they grow wiser; that those men who are at the most pains to see the best that is to be seen, to hear the best that is to be heard, and to read the best that

is to be read, are only laboring, in most cases, to exhaust the sources of innocent gratification, and incapacitating themselves for future enjoyment, by approaching that condition which has been described as a state of —

"Painful pre-eminence, yourself to view

Above life's weakness, and its comforts too"?

Fortunately, all men are not thus constituted. A few there are who, by a happy alchemy, are able to extract even keener and keener delight from each successive draught of the cup of innocent pleasure which they have found suited to their taste. Macaulay declared that he had