this of Sentimentalism, so useful for weeping with over romances and on pathetic occasions, it otherwise verily will avail nothing; nay less. The healthy heart that said to itself, "How healthy am I!" was already fallen into the fatallest sort of disease. Is not Sentimentalism twin-sister to Cant, if not one and the same with it? Is not Cant the materia prima of the Devil; from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations body themselves; from which no true thing can come? For Cant is itself properly a double-distilled Lie; the second-power of a Lie. -F. R., P. I., B. II. 7.

THE QUACK.

THE impostor is false; but neither are his dupes altogether true: is not his first grand dupe the falsest of all, -himself namely? Sincere men, of never so limited intellect, have an instinct for discriminating sincerity. The cunningest Mephistopheles cannot deceive a simple Margaret of honest heart; it stands written on his brow.' Masses of people capable of being led away by quacks are themselves of partially untrue spirit. Ch. V.

QUACK and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the self-same substance; convertible personages; turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds are made. -P. & P. I. 4

No Quack can persuade like him who has himself some persuasion. Nay, so wondrous is the act of Believing, Deception and Self-deception must, rigorously speaking, co-exist in all Quacks; and he perhaps were definable as the best Quack, in whom the smallest muskgrain of the latter would sufficiently flavour the largest mass of the former.—

On the whole too, it is worth considering what element your Quack specially works in: the element of Won

der! The Genuine, be he artist or artisan, works in the finitude of the Known; the Quack in the infinitude of the Unknown.-If the ancient Father was named Chrysostom, or Mouth-of-Gold, be the modern Quack named Pinchbeckostom, or Mouth-of-Pinchbeck; in an Age of Bronze such metal finds elective affinities. -M. Cagliostro.

GULLIBILITY A BLESSING.

PROBABLY Imposture is of sanative, anodyne nature, and man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. S. R. II. 3.

CONSCIENCE.

THE Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake; that of searching in every character named human, for something like a conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for the most part, and feeling that Morality is the heart of Life, they judge that with all the world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts, Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before nor after, any farther than the Larder and Stateroom, which latter is properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no World-theory, Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the world. to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness is the type of him, only shiftiness or shiftlessness. -M. Diamond Necklace, V.

A SHIFTY WOMAN.

SHE is of that light unreflecting class, of that light unreflecting sex: varium semper et mutabile. And then

her Fine-ladyism, though a purseless one: capricious, coquettish, and with all the finer sensibilities of the heart; now in the rackets, now in the sullens; vivid in contradictory resolves; laughing, weeping without reason,—though these acts are said to be signs of reason. Consider too, how she has had to work her way, all along, by flattery and cajolery; wheedling, eavesdropping, namby-pambying: how she needs wages, and knows no other productive trades. Thought can hardly be said to exist in her: only Perception and Device. With an understanding lynx-eyed for the surface of things, but which pierces beyond the surface of nothing; every individual thing (for she has never seized the heart of it) turns up a new face to her every new day, and seems a thing changed, a different thing. Thus sits, or rather vehemently bobs and hovers her vehement mind, in the midst of a boundless many-dancing whirlpool of gilt-shreds, paper-clippings, and windfalls, to which the revolving chaos of my Uncle Toby's Smokejack was solidity and regularity. Reader! thou for thy sins must have met with such fair Irrationals; fascinating, with their lively eyes, with their quick snappish fancies; distinguished in the higher circles, in Fashion, even in Literature; they hum and buzz there, on graceful film-wings;-searching, nevertheless, with the wonderfullest skill for honey; untamable as flies!' -M. Diamond Necklace, V.

HERR TEUFELSDRÖCKH on the necESSITY

OF CLOTH.

SOCIETY, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth.

Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal-Drawing-rooms, Levees, Couchees; and how the ushers and. macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable Bishops, Admirals, and

miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing gallantly to the Anointed presence; and I strive, in my remote privacy, to form a clear picture of that solemnity,—on a sudden, as by some enchanter's wand, the-shall I speak it? the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those afflicted with the like.—

What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality, should the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream? Ach Gott! How each skulks into the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (Haupt-und Staats-Action) becomes a PickleherringFarce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; the tables (according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wails and howls.

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on itself, and will not forward with the picture. The Woolsack, the Ministerial, the Opposition Benches-infandum! infandum! —S. R. I. 9.

ARE we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's-seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE? —S. R. I. 10.

GENTLEMEN.

SERIOUSLY speaking, we must hold it a remarkable thing that every Englishman should be a 'gentleman;

that in so democratic a country, our common title of honour, which all men assert for themselves, should be one which professedly depends on station, on accidents. rather than on qualities; or at best, as Coleridge interprets it, on a certain indifference to money matters,' which certain indifference again must be wise or mad, you would think, exactly as one possesses much money, or possesses little! We suppose it must be the commercial genius of the nation, counteracting and suppressing its political genius; for the Americans are said to be still more notable in this respect than we. Now, what a hollow, windy vacuity of internal character this indicates; how, in place of a rightly ordered heart, we strive only to exhibit a full purse; and all pushing, rushing, elbowing on toward a false aim, the courtier's kibes are more and more galled by the toe of the peasant: and on every side, instead of Faith, Hope and Charity, we have Neediness, Greediness and Vainglory; all this is palpable enough. Fools that we are! Why should we wear our knees to horn, and sorrowfully beat our breasts, praying day and night to Mammon, who, if he would even hear us, has almost nothing to give? -M. Richter.

POLITENESS.

A MAN of real dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws of his situation are, and will conform to these. Rough old Samuel Johnson, blustering Boreas and rugged Arctic Bear as he often was, defined himself, justly withal, as a polite man: a noble manful attitude of soul is his; a clear, true and loyal sense of what others are, and what he himself is, shines through the rugged coating of him; comes out as grave deep rhythmus when his King honours him, and he will not 'bandy compliments with his King;'is traceable too in his indignant trampling-down of the