eggs, and other common articles of food has increased enormously out of proportion to the increase in population

a fact due to the great increase of consumption by the poor, to whom what once were almost unattainable luxuries have now become daily necessaries of life. Then, again, the great improvements which have been made in draining, paving, lighting, and cleaning the streets of modern towns have inured chiefly to the benefit of the poor; and it is they, too, who have been chiefly benefited by the multiplication of asylums and hospitals. Nearly all the great inventions and discoveries of the age have contributed more to the happiness of the poor than to that of the rich.

During the French revolution of 1848, M. Garnier Pages, the French statesman, was addressing a large and stormy meeting of workmen in Lyons, when he was interrupted by an ouvrier, who exclaimed that "the time had come for cutting off the coat-tails of the manufacturers." M. Pages quietly responded: "No, it is a question not of shortening the coat of the capitalist, but of lengthening the blouse of the workingman." He might have added, that, metaphorically speaking, the blouse had already been not only lengthened again and again, but also improved in material and texture.

The Abuse of THE late A. W. Kinglake, the brilliant Newspapers. author of "Eothen," made a characteristic remark one day on newspaper reading. A gentleman said to him:

"I suppose, Mr. Kinglake, you knew Mr. you were in the House of Commons?"

"Yes, yes, I knew him,

when

a clever man till he destroyed

his intellect."

"Good heavens! how? surely not ·

"Destroyed his intellect," continued Kinglake, “by reading the newspapers."

This cynical saying points to a real and serious evil of our times. Of course, no intelligent man can afford to dispense with the newspapers. Our daily and weekly journals are contemporary history, not accurate by any means, but still history. They are mirrors of the age; they are telescopes, which bring the most distant things. near; they are trumpets, which collect and bring within hearing all that is said throughout the globe; they are libraries, containing the quintessence of thousands of books, magazines, and reviews. Often a newspaper article, contributed by some leading scientist or scholar, contains the condensed results of years of patient and systematic observation, reading, and thinking. R. W. Emerson once said to me that he hesitated to destroy the smallest piece of a newspaper, before looking at both sides of it, lest it should contain some thought or fact or verse worthy of preservation. To students in every department of knowledge the newspaper is indispensable. As Mr. Hamerton has said, the mind is like a merchant's ledger, · it requires to be continually posted up to the latest date. Even the last telegram may have upset some venerable theory that has been received as infallible for ages. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the blessing of which we have spoken is egregiously abused, that thousands swamp their brains in a sea of newspaper reading.

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Instead of thinking for themselves, on the great political, social, economic, and religious questions of the day, the great majority of men let the daily or weekly journal do their thinking for them. In half an hour, while sipping

their coffee or tea, they have learned not only what subjects are agitating the world of politics, theology, science, or letters, but what opinions they ought to hold regarding them. Instead of reacting upon what they read, challenging the assertions made or the conclusions drawn, their minds are mere passive recipients, conduit-pipes through which day after day a stream of news, gossip, jests, and readymade opinions runs, without making a more permanent impression than water upon a waterspout.

We believe that newspaper reading, instead of being abortive, may be utilized so as to be of permanent profit. Every good newspaper in the course of a year contains hundreds of valuable articles essays, lectures, disquisitions, poems, extracts from new or old books, reviews, or magazines, etc. which are of lasting interest, and which should be cut out and preserved in envelopes or scrap-books, for future re-reading or reference. This, we are told, was a practice of the historian Bancroft. A great newspaper reader, he rarely took up one without finding in its columns something which he deemed worthy of preservation; his encyclopædias were immense collections of newspaper articles which had been pasted into his scrap-books under the topics to which they referred. Next to the enjoyment of some sterling classic or an epoch-making book by a modern thinker, we know of no greater pleasure than the reading of such a collection when carefully made. To a writer it is invaluable. Often when he is at a loss for a topic or for ideas, on the verge of mental bankruptcy, every draft made on his brain being protested, a terse extract into which some thoughtful and suggestive writer has squeezed the results of his maturest experience, observation, and reflec

tion will give a stimulus to the brain that will almost instantly break the ice in which one's ideas are congealed, and make them roll upon paper in a flood.

A Deathless WHEN that brilliant orator, Sargent S. Soldier. Prentiss, was a boy at school, he read and re-read Lemprière's Classical Dictionary with such delight that he almost knew it by heart. In after life he used to say that Lemprière was unrivalled as a means of giving interest and effect to a stump speech. When all other illustrations were powerless, he never knew the shirt of Nessus, the labors of Hercules, or the forge of Vulcan to fail in bringing down the house. Like Coleridge's two illustrations, the image of a man sleeping under a manchineal tree and the case of Alexander killing his friend Clitus, which the poet in his youth used as illustrations which Providence had bountifully made inexhaustible in their applications, no emergency could by any possibility arise to puzzle the Mississippi orator, but one of Lemprière's stories would come to the rescue.

Do not some preachers hold a similar opinion regarding certain pet illustrations which they have found apt and effective; and is it not about time to pension off, or at least to grant a furlough to, some of the seedy ones that bear the scars of long and honorable service? For example, there is the anecdote of the old soldier of Napoleon, who said to the surgeon who was probing his wound: "Cut deeper, and you'll find the Emperor." The story is a striking one, and serves happily to point a moral; but may not one tire of the aptest illustration if he hear it often, as the partridge-loving French abbé tired of the toujours perdrix at his meals? There was a time when I

could hardly hear sermons for two Sundays in succession, without hearing of the old grenadier; he was already an old acquaintance when my pastor introduced him. He (my pastor) went to Europe, and the Rev. Dr. T. preached with much ability in his place. To the doctor's credit be it said that he preached a considerable number of discourses without once resurrecting my old friend the grenadier; but the inevitable came at last, and I preserved my gravity as well as I could. Then Dr. G., from a neighboring church, supplied our pulpit for a single day; and for the first twenty minutes of his morning discourse I was foolish enough to fancy that I had escaped from the customary illustration; but, lo! the old mustache marched in at last, and with as much formality and stateliness of step as if he had never figured in any pulpit before. How many times I have encountered him in other churches, and in books, newspapers, and magazines, it is needless to say.

"Qui me délivra des Grecs et Romains?" cried the classic-ridden Frenchman. Who will deliver me from the old grenadier? say I. He clings to me as the old man of the sea clung to Sinbad the sailor. I am as tired of him as Dr. Johnson was of another hackneyed story, when he threatened to knock down any one who should speak to him of the Second Punic War. Parce, precor! brethren of the pulpit. Give us, if you please, Canute and the ocean, the eyeless fish of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the "mills which grind slowly," the Chicago cow and the lamp, the low watershed which divides the raindrops that run ultimately into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from those that run into the Gulf of Mexico, or any other of the exhausted and superannuated veterans of illustration, but let the old grenadier be discharged from service.