but itself. Are you a candidate for office or place of any kind? Do not, if unsuccessful, go about complaining of your rejection, for on such occasions, above all others, it is absolutely ruinous to appear ill-used.

The English naval commander, Lord Cochrane (afterward Earl of Dundonald), was a striking example of the folly of complaints of ill-usage. As a naval commander, he exhibited a combination of daring and prudence which were not surpassed in Nelson himself. He did greater deeds with smaller means than any other naval hero recorded in history. With a trumpery little vessel of one hundred and fifty-eight tons, throwing a broadside of shot that weighed but twenty-eight pounds, he won, in 1801, the most brilliant naval victory of the war with Napoleon, against sixfold odds, and in a thirteen months' cruise captured fifty vessels, one hundred and twenty-two guns, and five hundred and thirty-four men. With such abilities he needed nothing but prudence and self-restraint to rise to the highest posts in the navy. Yet from early manhood to the close of his career he seems never to have been without a grievance. Exasperated at seeing mediocre men usurping, by the favor of powerful friends, places and honors which he felt belonged to himself, he got up a controversy with the Admiralty, and made himself, all his life, by his complaints, the chief impediment to his own success. Exposing the incompetency of commanders under whom he fought, he made them his deadly enemies; and they contrived, by false accusations and court influence, to have him convicted of a crime of which he was guiltless, fined £1,000, sentenced to imprisonment for a year, and dismissed from the naval service. "We admit," says a British reviewer, "the justice of almost all his censures; but why, oh, why,

did he not hold his tongue until he had won a place from which he might speak so as to command attention?"

Haydon, the painter, was similarly imprudent, and early got the name of an ill-used man. When his great picture of "Dentatus" was completed in 1809, it was hung in the octagon room of the Royal Academy, and he resented the act as an insult. The result was, that when he applied for admission as an associate he was refused. All his life he complained bitterly of public neglect, and finally, harassed by ever-increasing debts, committed suicide.

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The brilliant critic and essayist, William Hazlitt, injured himself by posing as an ill-used man. Some of his writings, as an impartial critic remarks, "betray a pitiable sensitiveness to the little rubs and slights of life, ness about criticism, vexation about the superior social éclat of other literary laborers, showing him to be 'raw' all over."

Not only individual men, but nations, sometimes acquire a chronic habit of complaining, and are ill-used only the more in consequence. Poland for sixty years proclaimed to the world the outrages of which she was successively being made the victim. Everybody admitted the iniquity of the "partitions" by the neighboring States; but it is not in human nature to endure a man or a State that is always telling of grievances, and so the wrongs of Poland. became wearisome, and at last a bore. No power interposed to prevent her doom; and the victim of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian greed,

"Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime."

Overcoming a WHAT is more vexatious than an offensive Nickname. nickname? A coarse pun made by Herder

on Goethe's name rankled for nearly half a century in the great poet's mind, though no man could better have afforded to despise such a jest. There is a refinement of cruelty in some nicknames which recalls the barbarity of the old pagan persecutors of the Christians, who wrapped them up in the skins of wild beasts so that they might be worried and torn to pieces by dogs. The worst thing about these appellations is, that when a man is ticketed with one especially if it be one of those that are preeminently witty and come to their inventors in a flash of inspiration it sticks to him like the shirt of Nessus to Hercules; it is nearly impossible for the victim to throw it off. Nevertheless, such a feat has been performed, at least by a body of men.

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In our own late Civil War, Stannard's Vermont brigade, which was mustered into service in 1863 and stationed at Washington, was dubbed The Paper-Collar Brigade,” because some of the men were seen wearing paper-collars. But after the battle of Gettysburg, in which they had fought the rebels with great valor, and by an enfilading fire made fearful havoc on Pickett's right and on Wilcox's left during the famous charge on the third day of the fight, the insulting nickname was never flung at them again. They had wiped it out with blood.

Speculation and Practice.

WHAT a strange contradiction do the lives of authors often present to their writings! It was in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, or in the marble palaces of Syracuse, while wallowing in wealth and luxury, and robed in purple and fine linen, that Theocritus, the father and inimitable model of all other pastoral poets, wrote those idyls which are regarded as the

THE ORIGIN OF SOME POPULAR PHRASES.

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truest and most faithful pictures of that country life of which he knew nothing. Claudius, who tells us to crown the flowing bowl with laurel, was a teetotaler. Johnson, who wrote admirable essays on politeness, interrupted his opponents in conversation with "You lie, sir!" "You are a vile Whig, sir!" Rousseau, who died a martyr to his sensibility, betrayed each of his benefactors in turn, and sent his children to the foundling hospital. Sir William Blackstone, who so ably expounded the laws of England, exceeded the powers of an assignment. Young, whose Parnassus was a churchyard, and who drew his inspiration from the river Styx instead of from Hippocrene, was a place-hunter and a pleasure-seeker, who supped to satiety of worldly joys and then turned state's evidence against them. Colton, the epigrammatic moralist, who in his "Lacon " vehemently denounced self-murder, put a pistol-ball through his brain. Thomson, who sang the praises of early rising, used to lie abed till noon. Payne, who sang of "Home, sweet home," never had a home. The author of "There's a light in the window for thee" is reported to have died recently at the West in a prison. Brillat-Savarin, who wrote text-books for epicures, lived during the last ten years of his life on panada.

The Origin of ONE of the most interesting and profitable Some Popu- studies is that of words, and especially of lar Phrases. popular phrases. A great deal of curious, recondite history is often wrapped up in them; but, unfortunately, the metamorphosis which they undergo in the lapse of time is such that the most cunning word-hunter is often puzzled to trace their origin. Let us consider a few of these phrases.

"In spite of one's teeth" is said to date back to the time of King John of England, the violent and odious successor of Richard "the Lion-Heart," who was hated by all classes of his subjects for his exactions and impositions. Early in his reign, he got a worthy Jew into his clutches, and drew out one of his teeth daily, until, after a fortnight of torture, the Jew yielded to the tyrant's demands for money. Similarly, the phrase, "hauling over the coals" refers to a period in the twelfth or thirteenth century, when feudal barons extracted money from the Jews by suspending them above slow fires till they paid a ransom or died.

The political term "to rat," used far more in England than in this country, originated in the time of George I. His enemies reviled the adherents of the court as "Hanover rats." Not long after the accession of the House of Hanover to the English throne, some of the brown that is, the German or Norwegian - rats were brought over to England; and, being much stronger than the black or common rats, they in many places quite extirpated the latter. At first, the word both the noun and the verb "to rat". was levelled at the converts to the government of George I.; but gradually it obtained a wider meaning, and came to denote any sudden and mercenary change in politics.

The expression "to smell a rat," meaning to conceive a suspicion, is said to come from the German phrase Unrath wittern, to smell something objectionable. The German prefix un has passed into the English article a, and this and a perverted translation have given us the phrase in question.

In the phrase "dowse the glim" (put out the light), the