AN INTERRUPTION.

It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time, by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly done up. I was reciting at a particular house, the Remorse, and was in the midst of Athadra's description of the death of her husband, when a scrubby boy with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door, and cried out: "Please, ma'am, master says, will you ha', or will you not ha', the pin round?"-Coleridge.

SECRET HISTORY OF BOOKS.

If the secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down along-side of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader.—Thackeray.

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION.

Sydney Smith, in Peter Plymley's Letters, after showing the folly of oppressing the Irish Catholics, says, "I admit there is a vast luxury in selecting a particular set of Christians, and in worrying them as a boy worries a puppy-dog; it is an amusement in which all the young English are brought up from their earliest days. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist; but why connect them with danger? Why," he asks, "torture a bull-dog, when you can get a frog or a rabbit?"

UNANIMITY.

"We must be unanimous," said Hancock, on the occasion of signing the Declaration of Independence; "there must be no pulling different ways." "Yes," answered Franklin, "we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

OFFICIAL DRESS.

The Americans, we believe, are the first persons who have discarded the tailor in the administration of justice, and his auxiliary the barber-two persons of endless importance in codes and pandects of Europe. A judge administers justice, without a calorific wig and party-coloured gown, in a coat and pantaloons. He is obeyed, however; and life and property are not badly protected in the United States. We shall be denounced by the laureate as atheists and jacobins; but we must say, that we have doubts whether one atom of useful influence is added to men in important situations by any colour, quantity, or configuration of cloth and hair. The true progress of refinement, we conceive, is to discard all the mountebank drapery of barbarous ages. One row of gold and fur falls off after another from the robe of power, and is picked up and worn by the parish beadle and the exhibitor of wild beasts. Meantime, the afflicted wiseacre mourns over equality of garment; and wotteth not of two men, whose doublets have cost alike, how one shall command and the other obey.-Sydney Smith.

PREACHING TO THE POOR.

A woman in humble life was asked one day, on her way back from church, whether she had understood the sermon,—a stranger having preached. "Wud I hae the presumption!" was her simple and contented answer.

"Well, Master Jackson," said his minister, walking homeward after service, with an industrious labourer, who was a constant attendant; "well, Master Jackson, Sunday must be a blessed day of rest for you, who work so hard all the week! And you make good use of the day; for you are always to be seen at church!" "Aye, sir," replied Jackson, "it is, indeed, a blessed day; I works hard enough all the week; and then I comes to church o' Sundays, and sets me down, and lays my legs up, and thinks o' nothing."-The Doctor.

SEARCH AFTER CONTENTMENT.

I know a man that had health and riches, and several houses, all ready furnished, and would often trouble himself and family to be moving from one house to another, and being asked by a friend why he removed so often from one house to another, replied, "It was to find content in some one of them." But his friend, knowing his temper, told him if he would find content in any one of his houses, he must leave himself behind him; for content will never dwell but in a meek and quiet soul.- Walton's Angler.

LABOUR OF IDLENESS.

“There is more fatigue," says Tom Brown, “and trouble in a lady than in the most laborious life: who would not rather drive a wheelbarrow with nuts about the streets, or cry brooms, than be Arsennus ?" (a fine gentleman.) When Marshal Turenne died, it was asked what had occasioned his death; to which Prince Eugene replied, "By doing nothing."

OLD BEAUTIES.

Lady Ailesbury and Lady Stafford preserved their loveliness so long, that Walpole called them Huckaback Beauties, that never wear out.

HYPOCRISY OF A LORD CHANCELLOR.

When Lord Thurlow had, in 1788, first intrigued actively with the whigs and the Prince upon the Regency question, being apparently inclined to prevent his former colleague, and now competitor, from clutching that prize-suddenly discovering from one of the physicians the approaching convalescence of the royal patient, he at one moment's warning quitted the Carlton House party, with an assurance unknown to all besides, perhaps even to himself not known before, and in his place undertook the defence of the king's rights against his son and his partisans. The concluding sentence of this unheard of performance was calculated to set all belief at defiance, coming from the man and in the circum

stances. It assumed, for the sake of greater impressiveness, the form of a prayer; though certainly it was not poured out in the notes of supplication, but rather rung forth in the sounds that weekly call men to the service: "And when I forget my sovereign, may my God forget me!" Whereupon Wilkes, seated upon the foot of the throne, and who had known him long and well, is reported to have said, somewhat coarsely, but not unhappily, it must be allowed, "Forget you? He'll see you dd first." -Brougham's Statesman.

EVENINGS AT HOLLAND HOUSE.

In the Edinburgh Review is a glowing picture of the evenings at Holland House and of its admirable master, drawn by a favourite guest shortly after Lord Holland's death:

"The time is coming when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of our generation, will in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations, for the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favourite resort of wits and beauties -of painters and poets-of scholars, philosophers, and statesmen. They will then remember, with strange tenderness, many objects once familiar to them the avenue and the terrace, the busts and the paintings; the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical mottoes. With peculiar fondness they will recall that venerable chamber, in which all the ancient gravity of a college library was so singu