everything; the confirmed rascal suspects everyone-his experience of himself putting into the shade his experience of the whole world besides. All the complete rogues among mankind may without hesitation be placed in the class which is guided by the second principle; but the fools are by no means confined to the class which acts upon the first.

AN AUTHOR'S BOW.

The bow of an author who means to secure attention by twenty lines of preface should be a polished piece of impudence. Between boldness and elegance he catches most readers, and if the ornament is tinsel and the brave front hollow one must go farther to find it out. A confident tone and a graceful manner, in a writer or a preacher, on the platform or in the shop, will make very small ability go a great way. First impressions are always important. Resolution and self-assertion are more striking than modesty. With the crowd, to dare is to be great: only the few can discriminate. The charlatanism of the pen

is, however, more readily unveiled than any other kind of quackery; and as there are few frauds men are more annoyed by than to be cheated into admiration of something unworthy, a pretentious introduction of one'sself to notice can only be excused, like rebellion, by ultimate success.

A HOMEOPATHIC GLOBULE.

If Adam had been a Homœopathist clever enough to reduce one whole grain of opium to the thirtieth dilution (an ordinary strength for Homœopathic medicine), and if every one of his descendants had employed the whole term of life in taking this medicine, at the rate of a million doses per moment of time, there would remain enough of the original grain to physic all mankind for centuries upon centuries longer; and though no one would have taken as much opium as would send him to sleep, he must be a wonderful man who could enumerate the globules that would still be unswallowed without going to sleep. There is a grain of truth in the theory of the Homœopathists, but when that grain is divided

into 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles, the intellectual eye of one of the ten thousand angels that a mad philosopher calculated could dance on the point of a needle would scarcely be microscopic enough to discover a single particle.

ence.

SCIENTIFIC FICTIONS.

The poetic region of science is in the clouds -it is the border-land of science and nesciOne element of poetry is mystery, and true science can never possess that element. In a poetical image there must be scope for the fancy; a figure of speech that leaves no room whatever for wonder or speculation is not sublime; there must be something supposed that is not expressed. Transcendental science, aspiring to the vague charm of poetry, is apt to venture too far across that borderland of the obscure, and sometimes amazes and fascinates us by the imagined discovery of a scientific truth in a poetical fiction. One of these startling propositions is that there is no limit to the communication of motion and of

sound-that, though the sound ceases at a little distance to be heard by human ears, a spoken word does actually agitate the whole atmosphere and produce a mechanical effect on nature which reaches to the ends of the earth. There is something grand in the thought of one's words resounding through the whole universe, but the grandeur is owing to poetry, which has the inventive faculty, and not to science, the sole province of which is to discover.

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY.

These three words were the text of the first French Revolution. The text and the first exposition of it were given to the world two thousand years ago. The words mean something true, for France and for the world, for now and for ever. Liberty, the simplest, not often gainsaid; Equality, the hardest, wrecks most thinkers; Fraternity, the finest, the apex, the acme, the goal. Variously interpreted and moulded, often very wrongly, this is the text not only of French Revolutions, but of all popular claims and efforts, in all times and

places. It is Lamartine who says, "this idea is an emanation of Christianity," and he is right; Fraternity is in the Christian mission. It is very probable that when Lamartine said that Christianity first proclaimed the three words which French philosophy re-echoed two thousand years afterwards, he had such a secondary and circumscribed idea of what these words meant as would have infinitely detracted from the glory and the divinity of the Christian mission. But I accept his proposition: the genius of Christianity is spoken in these words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The words may be understood in an intellectual and spiritual as well as in a social and political sense. The last and grandest of the three is Fraternity, universal brotherhood, universal peace. Ever since the Christian era there has been going on a revolution having this for its text and object. Philanthropy has dreamed of it, and religion has prophesied it, but it is still a vision of times to come. The text ends and centres in Fraternity. It ends there a fact to be borne in mind by certain unintentionally mischievous reasoners