V.-INVENTIVE GENIUS AND LABOUR.

(ELIHU BURRITT.)

Elihu Burritt, an "American scholar, journalist, lecturer, and blacksmith," was born in Connecticut in 1811. His life has been one of extraordinary diligence and perseverance. He is best known in this country as the advocate of a great "Peace League," or "League of Universal Brotherhood," having for its aim the prevention of war, and the arrangement of all international disputes by quiet means.

THE physical necessity of mental activity, in every practical sense, confers upon the mind the power to determine our stature, strength, and longevity; to multiply our organs of sense, and increase their capacity, in some cases, to thirty million times their natural power. This capacity of the mind is not a mere prospective possibility; it is a fact, a tried, practical fact; and the human mind is more busy than ever in extending this prerogative.

Let us look in upon man while engaged in the very act of adding to his natural strength these gigantic faculties. See him yonder, bending over his stone mortar, and pounding, and thumping, and sweating, to pulverize his flinty grain into a more esculent form. He stops and looks a moment into the precipitous torrent thundering down its rocky channel. There! A thought has struck him. He begins to whistle; he whittles some, for he learned to whittle soon after he learned to breathe. He gears together, some horizontally, and others perpendicularly, a score of little wooden wheels. He sets them agoing, and claps his hands in triumph to see what they would do if a thousand times larger.

Look at him again. How proudly he stands, with folded arms, looking at the huge things that are working for him! He has made that wild, raging torrent as tame as his horse. He has taught it to walk backward and forward. He has given it hands, and put the crank of his big wheel into them, and made it turn his ponderous grindstone. What a taskmaster! Look at him again! He is standing on the ocean beach, watching the crested billows, as they move in martial squadrons over the deep. He has conceived, or

heard, that richer productions, more delicious fruits and flowers, may be found on yonder invisible shore. In an instant his mind sympathizes with the yearnings of his physical nature.

See! there is a new thought in his eye. He remembers how he first saddled the horse; he now bits and saddles the mountain wave. Not satisfied with taming this proud element, he breaks another into his service. Remembering his mill-dam, he constructs a floating dam of canvas in the air, to harness the winds to his ocean-waggon. Thus, with his water-horse and air-horse harnessed in tandem, he drives across the wilderness of waters with a team that would make old Neptune hide his diminished head for envy, and sink his clumsy chariot beneath the waves.

See now! he wants something else; his appetite for something better than he has, grows upon what he feeds on. The fact is, he has plodded about in his one-horse waggon till he is disgusted with his poor capacity of locomotion. The wings of Mercury, modern eagles and paper kites, are all too impracticable for models. He settles down upon the persuasion that he can make a great IRON HORSE, with bones of steel and muscles of brass, that will run against time with Mercury, or any other winged messenger of Jove -the daring man!

He brings out his huge leviathan hexapede upon the track. How the giant creature struts forth from his stable, panting to be gone! His great heart is a furnace of glowing coals; his lymphatic blood is boiling in his veins; the strength of a thousand horses is nerving his iron sinews. But his master reins him in with one finger, till the whole of some western village, men, women, children, and half their horned cattle, sheep, poultry, wheat, cheese, and potatoes, have been stowed away in that long train of waggons he has harnessed to his foaming steam-horse.

And now he shouts, interrogatively, "ALL RIGHT?" and, applying a burning goad to the huge creature, away it thunders over the iron road, breathing forth fire and smoke in its indignant haste to outstrip the wind. More terrible than the war-horse in Scripture, clothed with louder thunder, and emitting a cloud of flame and burning coals from

his iron nostrils, he dashes on through dark mountain passes, over jutting precipices, and deep ravines. His tread shakes the earth like a travelling Niagara, and the sound of his chariot-wheels warns the people of distant towns that he is coming.

VI.-DUTY OF FORGIVENESS.

(SAMUEL JOHNSON.)

Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709, and died in 1784. His name occupies a foremost place among the literary men who distinguished the eighteenth century.

A WISE man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. He that willingly suffers the corrosions of inveterate hatred, and gives up his days and nights to the gloom of malice and perturbations of stratagem, cannot surely be said to consult his ease. Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest. The man who retires to meditate mischief, and to exasperate his own rage; whose thoughts are employed only on means of distress and contrivances of ruin; whose mind never pauses from the remembrance of his own sufferings, but to indulge some hope of enjoying the calamities of another, may justly be numbered among the most miserable of human beings, among those who are guilty without reward, who have neither the gladness of prosperity nor the calm of innocence.

Whoever considers the weakness both of himself and others, will not long want persuasives to forgiveness. We know not to what degree of malignity any injury is to be imputed; or how much its guilt, if we were to inspect the mind of him that committed it, would be extenuated by mistake, precipitance, or negligence; we cannot be certain how much more we feel than was intended to be inflicted, or how much we increase the mischief to ourselves by voluntary aggravations. We may charge to design the effects of accident; we may think the blow violent only

because we have made ourselves delicate and tender; we are on every side in danger of error and of guilt, which we are certain to avoid only by speedy forgiveness.

From this pacific and harmless temper, thus propitious to others and ourselves, to domestic tranquillity and to social happiness, no man is withheld but by pride, by the fear of being insulted by his adversary, or despised by the world.

It may be laid down as an unfailing and universal axiom, that "all pride is abject and mean." It is always an ignorant, lazy, or cowardly acquiescence in a false appearance of excellence, and proceeds not from consciousness of our attainments, but insensibility of our wants.

Nothing can be great which is not right. Nothing which reason condemns can be suitable to the dignity of the human mind. To be driven by external motives from the path which our own heart approves,—to give way to anything but conviction, to suffer the opinion of others to rule our choice or overpower our resolves,-is to submit tamely to the lowest and most ignominious slavery, and to resign the right of directing our own lives.

The utmost excellence at which humanity can arrive, is a constant and determined pursuit of virtue, without regard to present dangers or advantages; a continual reference of every action to the divine will; an habitual appeal to everlasting justice; and an unvaried elevation of the intellectual eye to the reward which perseverance only can obtain. But that pride which many, who presume to boast of generous sentiments, allow to regulate their measures, has nothing nobler in view than the approbation of men; of beings whose superiority we are under no obligation to acknowledge, and who, when we have courted them with the utmost assiduity, can confer no valuable or permanent reward; of beings who ignorantly judge of what they do not understand, or partially determine what they never have examined; and whose sentence is, therefore, of no weight till it has received the ratification of our own conscience.

He that can descend to bribe suffrages like these at the price of his innocence; he that can suffer the delight of such acclamations to withhold his attention from the commands of the universal Sovereign, has little reason to con

gratulate himself upon the greatness of his mind: whenever he awakes to seriousness and reflection, he must become despicable in his own eyes, and shrink with shame from the remembrance of his cowardice and folly.

Of him that hopes to be forgiven, it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is, therefore, superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended; and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain.

VII.-MARSHAL BUGEAUD AND ARAB CHIEFTAIN.

(W. S. LANDOR.)

Walter Savage Landor, poet and essayist, is a native of Warwickshire, and was born in 1775. He spends the sunset of his days in exile.

Bugeaud. Such is the chastisement the God of battles in his justice and indignation has inflicted on you. Of seven hundred refractory and rebellious, who took refuge in the cavern, thirty, and thirty only, are alive; and of these thirty there are four only who are capable of labour, or indeed of motion. Thy advanced age ought to have rendered thee wiser, even if my proclamation, dictated from above in the pure spirit of humanity and fraternity, had not been issued. Is thy tongue scorched, that thou listenest, and starest, and scowlest, without answering me? What mercy after this obstinacy can thy tribe expect?

Arab. None; even if it lived. Nothing is now wanting to complete the glory of France. Mothers and children, in her own land, hath she butchered on the scaffold; mothers and children in her own land hath she bound together and cast into the deep; mothers and children in her own land hath she stabbed in the streets, in the prisons, in the temples. Ferocity such as no tales record, no lover of the marvellous and of the horrible could listen to or endure! In every country she has repeated the same atrocities, unexampled by the most sanguinary of the Infidels. To consume the helpless with fire, for the crime of flying from pollution and persecution, was wanting to her glory: she has won it. We