with which I heard

At length the fatal day came. I never shall forget the thrill open the case, and felt how soon it would be my turn to speak. Oh, how did I pray for a long speech! I lost all feeling of rivalry; and would have gladly given him every thing that I intended to use myself, only to defer the dreaded moment for one half hour. His speech was frightfully short, yet short as it was, it made sad havoc with my stock of matter. The next speaker was even more concise, and yet my little stock suffered again severely. I then found how experience will stand in the place of study; these men could not, from the multiplicity of their engagements, have spent a tithe of the time upon the case which I had done, and yet they had seen much which had escaped all my research. At length my turn came. I was sitting among the back rows in the old court of King's Bench. It was on the last day of Michaelmas Term, and late in the evening. A sort of darkness visible had been produced by the aid of a few candles dispersed here and there. I arose, but I was not perceived by the judges who had turned together to consult, supposing the argument finished. B- was the first to see me, and I received from him a nod of kindness and encouragement, which I hope I never shall forget. The court was crowded, for it was a question of some interest; it was a dreadful moment; the ushers stilled the audience into an awful silence. I began, and at the sound of an unknown voice every wig of the white inclined plane at the upper end of which I was standing suddenly turned round, and in an instant I had the eyes of seventy "learned friends" looking me full in the face! It is hardly to be conceived by those who have not gone through the ordeal how terrific is this mute attention to the object of it. How grateful should I have been for any thing which would have relieved me from its oppressive weight,-a buzz, a scraping of the shoes, or a fit of coughing would have put me under infinite obligation to the kind disturber. What I said, I know not; I knew not then; it is the only part of the transaction of which I am ignorant; it was a "phantasma or hideous dream." They told me to my great surprise, that I spoke in a loud voice, used violent gesture, and as I went along seemed to shake off my trepidation. Whether I made a long speech or a short one, I cannot tell, for I had no power of measuring time.

All I know is, that I should have made a much longer one if I had not felt my ideas, like Bob Acres's courage, oozing out of my fingers' ends. The court decided against us, erroneously as I of course thought, for the young advocate is always on the right side, The next morning I got up early to look at the newspapers, which I expected to see full of our case. In an obscure corner and in a small type, I found a few words given as the speeches of my leaders-and I also read, that "Mr. followed on the same side."

166.-APOPHTHEGMS.-V.

ALL of us, who are worth any thing, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes, of our youth.-SHELLEY. Letters.

Rage is essentially vulgar, and never vulgarer than when it proceeds from mortified pride, disappointed ambition, or thwarted wilfulness. A baffled despot is the vulgarest of dirty wretches, no matter whether he be the despot of a nation vindicating its rights, or of a donkey sinking under its load.-HARTLEY COLERIDGE. Biographia Borealis.

IMPEDIMENTS TO THE PROGRESS OF TRUTH.-Truth and error, as they are essentially opposite in their nature, so the causes to which they are indebted for their perpetuity and triumph are not less so. Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry, is favorable to error; whatever promotes it, to truth. But nothing, it will be acknowledged, has a greater tendency to obstruct the exercise of free inquiry than the spirit and feeling of a party. Let a doctrine, however erroneous, become a party distinction, and it is at once intrenched in interests and attachments which make it extremely difficult for the most powerful artillery of reason to dislodge it. It becomes a point of honor in the leaders of such parties, which is from thence communicated to their followers, to defend and support their respective peculiarities to the last; and, as a natural consequence, to shut their ears against all the pleas and remonstrances by which they are assailed. Even the wisest and best of men are seldom

aware how much they are susceptible of this sort of influence; and while the offer of a world would be insufficient to engage them to recant a known truth, or to subscribe an acknowledged error, they are often retained in a willing captivity to prejudices and opinions which have no other support, and which, if they could lose sight of party feelings, they would almost instantly abandon.-REV. ROBERT HALL.

FASHION. While the world lasts, fashion will continue to lead it by the nose. And, after all, what can fashion do for its most obsequious followers? It can ring the changes upon the same things, and it can do no more. Whether our hats be white or black, our caps high or low, whether we wear two watches or one, is of little consequence. There is indeed an appearance of variety; but the folly and vanity that dictates and adopts the change are invariably the same. When the fashions of a particular period appear more reasonable than those of the preceding, it is not because the world is grown more reasonable than it was; but because, in a course of perpetual changes, some of them must sometimes happen to be for the better. Neither do I suppose the preposterous customs that prevail at present a proof of its greater folly. In a few years, perhaps next year, the fine gentleman will shut up his umbrella, and give it to his sister, filling his hand with a crab-tree cudgel instead of it: and when he has done so will he be wiser than now? By no means. The love of change will have betrayed him into a propriety which, in reality, he has no taste for, all his merit on the occasion amounting to no more than this—that, being weary of one plaything, he has taken up another.-COWPER.

GENIUS.-I never knew a poet, except myself, who was punctual in any thing, or to be depended on for the due discharge of any duty, except what he thought he owed to the Muses. The moment a man takes it into his foolish head that he has what the world calls Genius, he gives himself a discharge from the servile drudgery of all friendly offices, and becomes good for nothing, except in the pursuit of his favorite employment.--CowPER.

NASEBY FIELD. The old hamlet of Naseby stands yet on its old hill-top, very much as it did in Saxon days, on the northwestern border of Northamptonshire, some seven or eight miles

from Market-Harborough in Leicestershire, nearly on a line, and nearly midway, between that town and Daventry. A peaceable old hamlet, of perhaps five hundred souls; clay cottages for laborers, but neatly thatched and swept; smith's shop, saddler's shop, beer shop, all in order; forming a kind of square, which leads off, north and south, into two long streets: the old church with its graves, stands in the centre, the truncated spire finishing itself with a strange old ball, held up by rods; a hollow copper ball, which came from Boulogne in Henry the Eighth's time," which has, like Hudibras's breeches, "been at the siege of Bullen." The ground is upland, moorland, though now growing corn; was not inclosed till the last generation, and is still somewhat bare of wood. It stands nearly in the heart of England; gentle dulness, taking a turn at etymology, sometimes derives it from Nnval; "Navesby, quasi Navelsby, from being," &c. Avon Well, the distinct source of Shakspeare's Avon, is on the western slope of the high grounds; Nen and Welland streams leading towards Cromwell's Fen-Country, begin to gather themselves from boggy places on the eastern side. The grounds, as we say, lie high; and are still, in their new subdivisions, known by the name of "Hills," "Rutput Hill," "Mill Hill," "Dust Hill," and the like, precisely as in Rushworth's time: but they are not properly hills at all; they are broad, blunt, clayey masses, swelling towards and from each other, like indolent waves of a sea, sometimes of miles in extent.

It was on this high moor-ground, in the centre of England, that King Charles, on the 14th of June, 1645, fought his last battle; dashed fiercely against the New-Model army, which he had despised till then; and saw himself shivered utterly to ruin thereby. "Prince Rupert, on the king's right wing, charged up the hill, and carried all before him;" but Lieutenant-General Cromwell charged down hill on the other wing, likewise carrying all before him,-and did not gallop off the field to plunder, he. Cromwell, ordered thither by the Parliament, had arrived from the association two days before, "amid shouts from the whole army:" he had the ordering of the horse this morning. Prince Rupert, on returning from his plunder, finds the king's infantry a ruin; prepares to charge again with the rallied cavalry; but the

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cavalry too, when it came to the point, "broke all asunder,”never to re-assemble more. The chase went through Harborough ; where the king had already been that morning, when in an evil hour he turned back, to revenge some surprise of an outpost at Naseby the night before," and give the Roundheads battle. The parliamentary army stood ranged on the height still partly called Mill Hill," as in Rushworth's time, a mile and a half from Naseby; the king's army on a parallel " Hill," its back to Harborough, with the wide table of upland now named Broad Moor between them; where indeed the main brunt of the action still clearly enough shows itself to have been. There are hollow spots of a rank vegetation, scattered over that Broad Moor; which are understood to have once been burial mounds; some of which have been (with more or less of sacrilege) verified as such. A friend of mine has in his cabinet two ancient grinder-teeth, dug lately from that ground, and waits for an opportunity to re-bury them there. Sound effectual grinders, one of them very large, which ate their breakfast on the fourteenth of June two hundred years ago, and, except to be clenched once in grim battle, had never work to do more in this world!-THOMAS CARLYLE.

THE RABBLE AND THE PEOPLE.-In the summer of 1754, Henry Fielding, the great author of "Tom Jones," left England, never to return, having been ordered by physicians to Lisbon for recovery of his broken health. He has written a most graphic journal of this voyage, full of striking pictures of our social condition ninety years ago. We select the account of his embarkation at Rother

hithe.

"To go on board the ship it was necessary first to go into a boat, a matter of no small difficulty, as I had no use of my limbs, and was to be carried by men who, though sufficiently strong for their burden, were, like Archimedes, puzzled to find a steady footing. Of this, as few of my readers have not gone into wherries on the Thames, they will easily be able to form to themselves an idea. However, by the assistance of my friend Mr. Welch, whom I never think or speak of but with love and esteem, I conquered this difficulty, as I did afterwards that of ascending the ship, into which I was hoisted with more ease by a chair lifted with pulleys, I was soon seated in a great chair in the cabin, to refresh myself