patimur longæ pacis mala.' Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put the world brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet been discovered. No civilization can bear more than a certain proportion of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and crime. When this proportion has been reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding breaks down; institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon it, and, if it is not eliminated, ends by destroying it." Spite in Text- INTENSELY bitter as are some men's political prejudices, it seems scarcely credible that they would find expression in scientific treatises and text-books; yet so they have in several notable instances. Dr. Johnson could not refrain from letting his bile overflow into his dictionary, as we see by his definitions of "excise" and "pension." The former is defined to be "a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged, not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid; " and "pension," to be " an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." One of the last places in which one would expect to meet with such an exhibition of temper is among the dispassionate definitions of a dictionary; and the Doctor would hardly have been betrayed into it had he dreamed that, only a few years later, he himself would accept a pension from George III. But Johnson, "a good hater," though he was an ultra Tory, has been surpassed by William Cobbett. In his English grammar, Cobbett contrives skilfully to drag in his political opinions, not occasionally, but again and again, and makes his examples and illustrations subservient to his likes and dislikes on almost every page. Thus, as an example of the time of an action expressed by a verb, he gives this: "The Queen [Queen Caroline] defies the tyrants, the Queen defied the tyrants, the Queen will defy the tyrants." To illustrate the hyphen, we have: "the never-to-be-forgotten cruelty of the borough tyrants; under the possessive case: "Oliver the Shy's evidence, Edwards the government's spy." Nouns of number and multitude are thus grouped together: "Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Court of King's Bench, den of thieves, and the like." "You may use," he tells his pupil, either a singular or plural verb with a noun of multitude, but you must not use both numbers in the same sentence. You may say, for instance, of the House of Commons, they refused to hear evidence against Castlereagh, when Mr. Maddox accused him of having sold a seat;' or, 'it refused to hear evidence.' It is wrong to say: 'Parliament is shamefully extravagant, and they are returned by a gang of rascally borough-mongers.' specimen of faulty syntax, Cobbett gives: "The Attorney-General Gibbs, whose malignity induced him to be extremely violent, and was listened to by the judges." As a But the bitterness of Johnson's, and even of Cobbett's, political prejudice pales before that of General Hill, the Confederate officer, as manifested in a text-book published by him just before the late Civil War. There are few persons whose ingenuity would not be puzzled and baffled in an attempt to introduce sectional feelings and personal spite into the neutral region of pure mathematics; but General Hill actually succeeded in conveying covert sneers by algebraical symbols, and insinuating contempt through mathematical problems. In a text-book called the "Elements of Algebra," strongly recommended by Professor Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute (afterward the famous rebel general, "Stonewall" Jackson), a number of problems are given, of which the following are specimens: "A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which cost him one-fourth of a cent apiece, with real nutmegs worth four cents apiece, and sells the whole assortment for $45, and gains $3.75 by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?" "At the Woman's Rights Convention, held at Syracuse, N. Y., composed of one hundred and fifty delegates, the old maids, childless wives, and bedlamites were to each other as the figures of 7 and 3. How many were there of the old maids?" Names vs. THE "Vermont Chronicle," a conservative Things. orthodox journal, said some years ago, with, we fear, too much truth, that "there are a great many people who are more afraid of saying that hell is not eternal, than they are of the eternity of hell. You will find a man who, in his business all through the week, in his weights and measures, in his gossip and small talk, has not the least fear of justice and eternal retribution, but will shake in his shoes on Sunday at the saying that hell is not eternal." How full of such inconsistencies is poor human nature, regarding not only religion, but morality and politics! It is said that there are political pedants who are so enamoured of a name that they would fret at being subjects of a monarchy administered in the best spirit of a republic, and glorify themselves on being citizens of a republic administered in the worst spirit of a monarchy. So, again, in the religious world, there are sticklers for orthodoxy, who, like the dying artist that scornfully rejected the supreme rites of his church because the crucifix presented to him violated the rules of art, will scowl at doctrinal sentiments which are saturated with the orthodox spirit because they are not couched in the technical orthodox language. Like the good woman who deemed tartar emetic very bad for children, saying that she should not for a moment think of giving it to her own, but always gave them antimonial wine (the selfsame thing), these ultra-orthodox persons are horror-struck at the very theological sentiments which they themselves cherish, when those sentiments are couched in any other language than an old, worn-out, effete, conventional technology, which was fit enough in its day, but out of which the meaning has long ago been emptied. A vivid example of this kind of human folly once occurred in the history of Rome. So long as Julius Cæsar, after he had reached the summit of power, refrained from assuming the insignia of kingly authority, the Romans allowed him as Imperator, Dictator, and Præfectus Morum, to enjoy all its substantial prerogatives. But when, during the Circensian games, his statue was borne in the procession with those of the divinities; when he assumed the royal wreath and the regal buskins, and exhibited an armed Venus upon his signet, while guards attended upon his person, the daggers were unsheathed against which his veteran bands and unequalled military genius could give him no protection. He had been suffered to shed with impunity the best blood of Rome, and to trample on her laws and liberties; but as men are roused and exasperated more by the symbols than by the substance of tyranny, it was only when he assumed the badges of kingly authority that his countrymen lost their patience, and plunged their daggers in his bosom. Greed of THE greed of praise which some writers Praise. betray in our day is one of the most offensive features of literature. The excessive laudation which they bestow upon other authors for the sake of being paid back in kind, perhaps with compound interest, sickens the stomach of common honesty. It reminds one of the days of Queen Anne, when mutual puffery was as common among the wits as biting satire of those whom they envied or rivalled. Dr. Johnson told Mrs. Piozzi, who was an adept in the arts of adulation, that if Samuel Richardson could have lived till she could have added her incense to that which already smoked on his altar, she would have added two or three years to that novelist's life; "for," said the great Mogul of literature, "that fellow died for want of change among his flatterers. He perished for want of more [of them], like a man obliged to breathe the same air till it is exhausted." (Is not that a piquant illustration?) What a contrast between this and Johnson's language concerning Milton, of whom he says that "from his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or favor gained, no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support." Worthy was such a man to receive the magnificent eulogium which follows: "His great |