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you repent of it now."-"I do, I do!" said the grateful man, "I bitterly repent it.". Well, well, my dear fellow, you know us now. How do you get on? What are you going to do?" The poor man stated that he had friends who could assist him when his certificate was obtained. "But how are you off in the mean time?"

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5. And the answer was, that, having given up every farthing to his creditors, he had been compelled to stint his family of even common necessities, that he might be enabled to pay the cost of his certificate. "My dear fellow, this will not do; your family must not suffer. Be kind enough to take this ten-pound note to your wife from me. There, there, my dear fellow! Nay, don't cry; it will be all well with you yet. Keep up your spirits, set to work like a man, and you will raise your head among us yet." The overpowered man endeavored in vain to express his thanks: the swelling in his throat forbade words. He put his handkerchief to his face, and went out of the door crying like a child.

CHAMBERS.

XCVIII.

LABOR AND GENIUS.

1. THE prevailing idea with young people has been, the incompatibility of labor and genius; and, therefore, from the fear of being thought dull, they have thought it necessary to remain ignorant. I have seen, at school and at college, a great many young men completely destroyed by having been so unfortunate as to produce an excellent copy of verses. Their genius being now established, all that remained for them to do was to act up to the dignity of the character; and as this dignity consisted in reading nothing new, in forgetting what they had already read, and in pretending to be acquainted with all subjects by a sort of off-hand exertion of talents, they soon collapsed into the most frivolous and insignificant of men.

2. It would be an extremely profitable thing to draw up a short and well-authenticated account of the habits of study of the most celebrated writers with whose style of literary industry we happen to be most acquainted. It would go very far to destroy the absurd and pernicious association of genius and idleness, by showing that the greatest poets, orators, statesmen, and histori-men of the most brilliant and imposing talents, have actually labored as hard as the makers of dictionaries and the arrangers of indexes; and that the most obvious reason why they have been superior to other men is, that they have taken more pains than other men.

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3. Gibbon was in his study every morning, winter and summer, at six o'clock; Mr. Burke was the most laborious and indefati gable of human beings; Leibnitz was never out of his library; Pascal killed himself by study; Cicero narrowly escaped death by the same cause; Milton was at his books with as much regularity as a merchant or an attorney, - he had mastered all the knowledge of his time; so had Homer. Raffaelle lived but thirty-seven years; and in that short space carried the art so far beyond what it had before reached, that he appears to stand alone as a model to his successors.

4. There are instances to the contrary; but, generally speaking, the life of all truly great men has been a life of intense and incessant labor. They have commonly passed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent humility,- overlooked, mistaken, contemned, by weaker men, thinking while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the dregs of the world.

5. And then, when their time was come, and some little acci dent has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind. Then do the multitude cry out "a miracle of genius!" Yes, he is a miracle of genius, because he is a miracle of labor; because, instead of trusting to the resources of his own single mind, he has ransacked a thousand minds; because he makes use of the accumulated wisdom of ages, and takes as his point of departure the very last line and boundary to which science has advanced; because it has ever been the object of his life to assist every intellectual gift of nature, however munificent, and however splendid, with every resource that art could suggest, and every attention diligence could bestow.

6. But, while I am descanting upon the conduct of the under. standing, and the best modes of acquiring knowledge, some men may be disposed to ask, "Why conduct my understanding with such endless care? and what is the use of so much knowledge?" What is the use of so much knowledge?. What is the use of so

much life? what are we to do with the seventy years of existence allotted to us? and how are we to live them out to the last? I solemnly declare that, but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher as preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for the fire of our minds is like the fire which the Persians burn in the mountains, it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed, —

upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions.

7. Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love coë'val with life, what do I say, but love innocence; love virtue; love purity of conduct; love that which, if you are rich and great, will sanctify the blind fortune which has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you, which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain, that may be your lot in the outer world, - that which will make your motives habitually great and honorable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud!

8. Therefore, if any young man here have embarked his life in pursuit of knowledge, let him go on without doubting or fearing the event; let him not be intimidated by the cheerless beginnings of knowledge, by the darkness from which she springs, by the difficulties which hover around her, by the wretched habitations in which she dwells, by the want and sorrow which sometimes journey in her train; but let him ever follow her as the Angel that guards him, and as the Genius of his life. She will bring him out at last into the light of day, and exhibit him to the world comprehensive in acquirements, fertile in resources, rich in imagination, strong in reasoning, prudent and powerful above his fellows in all the relations and in all the offices of life.

REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

XCIX.

PERMANENCE OF THE USEFUL.

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1. THE tomb of Moses is unknown; but the traveller still slakes his thirst at the well of Jacob. The gorgeous palace of the wisest and wealthiest of monarchs, with its cedar, and gold, and ivory, — even the great temple of Jerusalem, hallowed by the visible glory of the Deity himself, are gone; but Solomon's reservoirs are as perfect as ever. Of the ancient architecture of the Holy City not one stone is left upon another; but the pool of Bethesda commands the pilgrim's reverence at the present day.

2. The columns of Persepolis are mouldering into dust; but its cisterns and aqueducts remain to challenge our admiration.

The golden house of Nero is a mass of ruins; but the Aqua Claudia still pours into Rome its limpid stream. The temple of the sun, at Tadmor in the wilderness, has fallen, but its fountain sparkles as freshly in his rays as when thousands of worshippers thronged the lofty colonnades.

3. It may be that London will share the fate of Babylon, and nothing be left to mark its site save confused mounds of crumbling brick-work. But the works of Nature are imperishable. The Thames will continue to flow as it does now; and if any work of art should still rise over the deep ocean of Time, we may well believe that it will be neither a palace nor a temple, but some vast aqueduct or reservoir; and if any name should still flash through the mist of antiquity, it will probably be that of the man who, in his day, sought the happiness of his fellow-men rather than their glory, and linked his memory to some great work of national utility and benevolence.

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

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3. O, Virtue! when thy clime I seek.
Let not my spirit's flight be weak:
Let me not, like this feeble thing,
With brine still dropping from its wing

Just sparkle in the solar glow,
And plunge again to depths below;
But, when I leave the grosser throng
With whom my soul hath dwelt so long;
Let me, in that aspiring day,
Cast every lingering stain away,
And, panting for thy purer air,
Fly up at once, and fix me there!

MOOR

CI. THE VILLAGE PREACHER.

1. NEAR yonder copse, where once the garden smiled,
And still where many a garden-flower grows wild,
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.

A man he was to all the country dear,

And passing rich with forty pounds a year:
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,

Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change, his place,
Unskilful he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour,
Får other aims his heart had learned to prize,
More bent to raise the wretched than to rise

2. His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain,
The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

Sat by his fire, and talked the night away;

Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,

Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.

Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe:
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.

3 Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side;
But, in his duty prompt at every call,

He watched and wept, he prayed and felt, for all,
And, as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.
Beside the bed where parting life was laid,
And sorrow, guilt, and pain, by turns dismayed.

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