bower a cottage thickly and completely with nothing but roses, and nobody would desire the interference of another plant.

Suppose flowers themselves were new! Suppose they had just come into the world, a sweet reward for some new goodness, and that we had not yet seen them quite developed; that they were in the act of growing, had just issued with their green stalks out of the ground, and engaged the attention of the curious. Imagine what we should feel when we saw the first lateral stem bearing off from the main one or putting forth a leaf... How we should watch the leaf gradually unfolding its little graceful hand; then another, then another; then the main stalk rising and producing more; then one of them giving indications of the astonishing novelty-a bud! then this mysterious bud gradually unfolding like the leaf, amazing us, enchanting us, almost alarming us with delight, as if we knew not what enchantment were to ensue, till at length, in all its fairy beauty, and odorous voluptuousness, and mysterious elaboration of tender and living sculpture, shines forth the blushing flower.

Yet this phenomenon to a person of any thought and lovingness, is what may be said to take place every day; for the commonest objects are wonders at which habit has made us cease to wonder, and the marvellousness of which we may renew at pleasure by taking thought... Last spring, walking near some cultivated grounds, and seeing a multitude of green stalks peeping forth, we amused ourselves with imagining them the plumes or other head gear of fairies, and wondered what faces might ensue; and from this exercise of the fancy, we fell to considering how true, and not merely fanciful, those speculations were, what a perpetual reproduction of the marvellous was carried on by Nature; how utterly ignorant we were of the causes of the least and most disesteemed of the commonest vegetables, and what a quantity of life, and beauty, and mystery, and use, and enjoyment was to be found in them, composed of all sorts of elements, and shaped as if by the hands of fairies... What workmanship with no apparent workman! A tree grows up, and at the tips of his rugged dark fingers, he puts forth round, smooth, and shining delicately, the golden apple or the cheek-like beauty of the peach.

The other day we were in a garden where Indian corn was growing, and some of the ears were plucked to show us. First one leaf or sheath was picked off, then another, another, a fourth, and so on, as if a fruit seller were unpacking his papers; and at last we came, in the inside, to the grains of corn, packed in cucumber shapes of pale gold, and each of them pressed and

flattened against each other, as if some human hand had been doing it in the caverns of the earth. BUT WHAT HAND? The same that made the poor, yet rich, hand (for is it not His workmanship also!) that is tracing these marvelling lines; and if it does not tremble to say so, it is because love sustains, and because the heart also is a flower which has a right to be tranquil in the garden of the All-wise. Leigh Hunt.

THE QUACK PHILOSOPHER DISCOMFITED.

FOR Some time my elder brother turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling..." Pooh!" he said; "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see me standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for half an hour together, meditating profoundly!" My sister Mary remarked that we should all be very glad to see him in that position..." If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating... But this he found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of Paris; but the case would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was not, he changed his plan ... The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming-top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the rotary motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation ... He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis, perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made anything of it... The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, "if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" 66 Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose doubt in fact had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from

its complexity, would not work; a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming-top that was required, but a peg-top. Now this, in order to keep up the whirl at full stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate; to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs, was a thing he could not bring his mind to face.

However, as some compensation to us, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as everybody must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilised society... As he had made many a fire-balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by parachutes, it was not very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again, which, however, was a far different thing, he refused, under such poor encouragements, to try his winged parachutes any more, either "aloft or below: " in the meantime, he resumed his general lectures on physics... From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's.

He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother, she arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures for ever... He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the half circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities Upon which a voice, a female voice, but whose voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish, retorted, “No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin; and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed: "Dark as night; then came my younger brother's insurrectionary yell: Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in, melodiously: "Dark as pitch"... And so the peal continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to

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make head against it; whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round robin,” it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as to the ringleader... Burke's epithet of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in everybody's mouth; and accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows, that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, muttering not very complimentary phrases. We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother himself condescended at last to join us; but there ended the course of lectures on Natural Philosophy. De Quincey.

OCCUPATIONS: THEIR SIGNS AND SEALS.

ALL know that there exists such a thing as professional character. On some men, indeed, nature imprints so strongly the stamp of individuality, that the feebler stamp of circumstance and position fails to impress them. Such, cases, however, must always be regarded as exceptional. On the average masses of mankind, the special employments which they pursue, or the kinds of business which they transact, have the effect of moulding them into distinct classes, each of which bears an artificially induced character.

Clergymen, as such, differ from merchants and soldiers, and all three from lawyers and physicians. Each of these professions has long borne in our literature, and in common opinion, a character so clearly appreciable by the public generally, that, when truthfully reproduced in some new work of fiction, or exemplified by some transaction in real life, it is at once recognised as marked by the genuine class-traits and peculiarities... But the professional characteristics descend much lower in the scale than is usually supposed. There is scarcely a trade or a department of manual labor that does not induce its own set of peculiarities; peculiarities which, though less within the range of the observation of men in the habit of recording what they remark, are not less real than those of the man of physic or of law... The barber is as unlike the weaver, and the tailor as unlike both, as the farmer is unlike the soldier, or as either farmer or soldier is unlike the merchant, lawyer, or minister. And it is only on the same sort of principle that all men, when seen from the top of a lofty tower, whether they be tall or short, seem of the same stature, that these differences escape

Between the workmen that pass sedentary lives within doors, such as weavers and tailors, and those who labor in the open air, such as masons and ploughmen, there exists a grand generic difference. Sedentary mechanics are usually less contented than laborious ones; and as they almost always work in parties, and as their comparatively light, though often long and wearilyplied employments, do not so much strain their respiratory organs but that they can keep up an interchange of idea when at their toils, they are generally much better able to state their grievances, and much more fluent in speculating on their causes. They develop more freely than the laborious out-of-door workers of the country, and present, as a class, a more intelligent aspect. On the other hand, when the open-air worker does so overcome his difficulties as to get fairly developed, he is usually of a fresher or more vigorous type than the sedentary one.

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The specific peculiarities induced by particular professions are not less marked than the generic ones. How different, for instance, the character of a sedentary tailor, as such, from that of the equally sedentary barber! Two imperfectly taught young lads, of not more than the average intellect, are apprenticed, the one to the hair-dresser, the other to the fashionable clothes-maker of a large village... The barber has to entertain his familiar round of customers, when operating upon their heads and beards. He must have no controversies with them; that might be disagreeable, and might affect his command of the scissors or razors; but he is expected to communicate to them all he knows of the gossip of the place; and as each customer supplies him with a little, he of course comes to know more than anybody else... As his light and work lays no stress on his respiration, in course of time he learns to be a fast and fluent talker, with a great appetite for news, but little given to dispute. He acquires, too, if his round of customers be good, a courteous manner; and if they be in large proportion Conservatives, he becomes, in all probability, a Conservative too... The young tailor goes through an entirely different process. He learns to regard dress as the most important of all earthly things; becomes knowing in cuts and fashions; is taught to appreciate, in a way no other individual can, the aspect of a button, or the pattern of a vest; and as his work is cleanly, and does not soil his clothes, and as he can get them more cheaply, and more perfectly in the fashion, than other mechanics, the chances are ten to one that he turns out a beau. He becomes great in that which he regards as of all things greatest, dress... A young tailor may be known by the cut of his coat and the merits of his pantaloons, among