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.

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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 Lieut nant-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

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 Rotherhithe.

"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

after a fatigue which had been more intolerable, in a quarter of a Inile's passage from my coach to the ship, than I had before undergone in a land-journey of twelve miles, which I had travelled with the utmost expedition.

"This latter fatigue was, perhaps, somewhat heightened by an indignation which I could not prevent arising in my mind. I think, upon my entrance into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself. In this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it) through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts. It may be said that this barbarous custom is peculiar to the English, and of them only to the lowest degree; that it is an excrescence of an uncontrolled licentiousness mistaken for liberty, and never shows itself in men who are polished and refined in such manner as human nature requires to produce that perfection of which it is susceptible, and to purge away that malevolence of disposition, of which, at our birth, we partake in common with the savage creation."

It is some satisfaction to contrast Fielding, insulted in his misery by the lowest of the rabble, with Scott, under circumstances equally calculated to call forth the sympathy of man for man. The great author of "Waverley" was lying in hopeless illness at the St. James's Hotel, in Jermyn Street, in the summer of 1832. That the affliction of the most popular writer of his age should call forth every sentiment of respect from the high and the refined, was of course to be expected; but it is well to know that the refinement had gone deeper into the native soil than those of Fielding's day might have thought probable. Mr. Lockhart, in his "Life of Sir Walter Scott." writes, "Allan Cunningham mentions that, walking home late one night, he found several working-men standing together at the corner of Jermyn Street, and one of them