SIDE WIND ATTACK.-The not uncommon custom of pelting a friend, after he has left the company, seems to have been derived from the practice of the ancient tribes, who erected a monument to a departed hero, by throwing stones upon him.

SILENCE.-A thing which it is often difficult to keep, in exact proportion as it is dangerous not to keep it. So frail that we cannot even speak of it without breaking it, and yet as easily and as completely to be restored as it was destroyed, few people understand the use, or appreciate the value of this mysterious quality. All men when they talk, think that they are conferring pleasure upon others, because they feel it themselves; but none suspect that the same object may sometimes be more effectually obtained by their silence. A good listener is much more rare than a good talker, because the conversation of general society seldom fixes the attention, and thus in the hopelessness of curing the evil, we aggravate it. "When I go into company," said L——, “I am compelled to become as great a chatterbox as the rest, because I had rather hear my own nonsense than that of other people." "After all," observed his niece one day, when he was twitting her with her loquacity,-"I know many men who talk more than women."11 Ay," was the reply, more to the

point."

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L— was once overturned in a carriage with his niece, who, finding after all her screams, that she had received no hurt, asked her uncle how, in such an imminent danger, he could have preserved so perfect a silence. "Because I was tolerably sure that death would not be frightened away by my making a noise."

Socrates, when a chatterbox applied to him to be taught rhetoric, said that he must pay double the usual price, because it would first be necessary to teach him to hold his tongue. We may be sometimes gainers by practising this difficult art, even at a festive meeting. Silence," exclaimed an epicure

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to some noisy guests, "you make so much noise that we don't know what we are eating."

SILK. The refuse of a reptile, employed to give distinction and dignity to the lord of the creation. Compare the caterpillar in its coccoon, with the king's counsel in his silk gown, and in adjusting the claims of the rival worms, the palm of ingenuity must be conceded to the former, because it spins and fashions its own covering, whereas the latter can only spin out the thread of empty elocution, and weave a web of sophistry. The Abbé Raynal calls silk, "l'ouvrage de ce ver rampant, qui habille l'homme de feuilles d'arbres élaborées dans son sein." Hear how the pompous Gibbon gives the same information. "I need not explain that silk is originally spun from the bowels of a caterpillar, and that it composes the golden tomb, whence a worm emerges in the form of a butterfly." There is an Arabian proverb which conveys the same fact in a much more moral and poetical form. "With patience and perseverance, the leaf of the mulberry tree becomes satin."

SLANDERER.-A person of whom the Greeks showed a due appreciation, when they made the word synonymous with devil. Slanderers are at all events economical, for they make a little scandal go a great way, and rarely open their mouths, except at the expense of other people. We must allow that they have good excuse for being defamatory, if it be their object to bring down others to their own level. It may be further urged in their extenuation, that they are driven to their trade by necessity; they filch the fair character of others, because they have none of their own; and with this advantage, that the stolen property can never be found upon them. There is a defence also for their covert and cowardly mode of attacking you, for how can you expect that backbiters should meet you face to face? Nay, they have even a

valid plea for being so foul-mouthed, considering how often

they have been compelled to eat their own words. Hang them! let us do the fellows justice!

SLAVE-DRIVER.-A white brute employed to coerce and torture black men. Old Fuller calls Negroes, "images of God carved in ebony." May we not say of their white task-masters, that they are images of the devil carved in ivory?

SNUFF.-Dirt thrust up the nostrils with a pig-like snort, as a sternutatory, which is not to be sneezed at. The moment he has thus defeated his own object, the snuffling snufftaker becomes the slave of a habit, which literally brings his nose to the grindstone; his Ormskirk has seized him as St. Dunstan did the devil, and if the red hot pincers could occasionally start up from the midst of the rappee, few persons would regret their embracing the proboscis of the offender. Lord Stanhope has very exactly calculated that in forty years, two entire years of the snuff-taker's life will be devoted to tickling his nose, and two more to the agreeable processes of blowing and wiping it, with other incidental circumstances. Well would it be if we bestowed half the time in making ourselves agreeable, that we waste in rendering ourselves offensive to our friends. Society takes its revenge by deciding, that no man would thrust dirt into his head, if he had got anything else in it.

SOCIETY.-If persons would never meet except when they have something to say, and if they would always separate when they have exhausted their pleasant or profitable topics, how delightful, but alas! how evanescent would be our social assemblages.

SOLDIER.-A man machine, so thoroughly deprived of its human portion, that at the breath of another man machine, it will blindly inflict or suffer destruction. Divested of his

tinsel trappings, his gold lace, feathers, music, and the glitter of the false glory with which it has been attempted to dazzle the world as to his real state, it is difficult to imagine anything more humiliating, than the condition of a soldier.

Nothing so much shows the triumph of opinion and usage over fact, of the conventional over the abstract, as that a profession, apparently so much at variance with all their feelings, should be chosen by gentlemen of independence, humanity, and reflection. Nothing is more redeeming to our common nature than that such men, placed in a sphere so expressly calculated to make them both slavish and tyrannical, should generally preserve their good qualities from contamination. Few characters so honourable, few gentlemen so courteous, few companions so agreeable as a British officer; but this is not in consequence, but in spite of his being in the army. Why he ever entered it, we presume not to inquire, but we are bound to believe that his motive was not less rational and amiable than that of the affectionate Irishman, who enlisted in the seventy-fifth regiment, in order to be near his brother, who was a corporal in the seventy-sixth.-(Vide Josephus Molitor.)

SPECULATION.—A word that sometimes begins with its second letter.

SPELLING-BAD-is sometimes the best, as in the case of the Beer vender, who wrote over his shop door," Bear sold here," manifestly implying, as was observed by my friend T. H, that it was his own Bruin. Not less ingenious was the device of the quack doctor, who announced in his printed handbills, that he could instantly cure, "the most ob"stinate aguews," thus satisfactorily proving that he was no conjuror, and did not attempt to cure them by a spell.

SPINSTER.—An unprotected female, and of course a fine subject for exercising the courage of cowards, and the wit of the witless.

STEAM.-Strange that there should slumber in yonder tranquil pond, a power so tremendous, that could we condense and direct its energies, it might cleave the solid earth in twain, and yet so gentle that it may be governed, and applied, and set to perform its stupendous miracles by a child! The discovery that water would resist being boiled above 212 degrees, has conferred upon England its manufacturing supremacy, and will eventually produce changes, both moral and physical, of which it is difficult to limit the extent. One bushel of coals, properly consumed, will raise seventy millions of pounds weight a foot high. The Menai Bridge, weighing four millions of pounds, suspended at a medium height of 120 feet, might have been raised where it is, by seven bushels of coals. M. Dupin estimates the steam engines of England to possess a moving power equivalent to that of 6,400,000 men at the windlass. And this stupendous agent is at present only in its infancy!

STOMACH.-The epicure's deity. Buffon gave it as his deliberate conviction, that this portion of our economy was the seat of thought, an opinion which he seems to have adopted from Persius, who dubs it a master of arts, and the dispenser of genius. So satisfied are we of its reflecting disposition, that we call a cow, or other beast with two stomachs, a ruminating animal par excellence. To judge by the quantity they eat, we might infer some of our own species to have two stomachs; but when we listen to their discourse, we find it difficult to include them in the class of ruminating animals.

STONE-The philosopher's. The folly of those who have inherited Midas's ears without his touch. A will-o'-thewisp, however, does not always lead us into quagmires; in running after shadows we sometimes catch substances, and in following illusions overtake the most valuable realities. The pursuit of the philosopher's stone has by no means been a vain one. Alchymy has given us chemistry, and we are