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Pinakidia

NDER the head of "Random Thoughts," "Odds and Ends," "Stray Leaves," "Scraps," "Breveties," and a variety of similar titles, we occasionally meet, in periodicals and elsewhere, with papers of rich interest and value, the result in some cases of much thought and more research, expended, however, at a manifest disadvantage, if we regard merely the estimate which the public are willing to set upon such articles. It sometimes occurs that in papers of this nature may be found a collective mass of general but more usually of classical erudition, which, if dexterously besprinkled over a proper surface of narrative, would be sufficient to make the fortunes of one or two hundred ordinary novelists in these our good days, when all heroes and heroines are necessarily men and women of "extensive acquirements." But for the most part these "Brevities," etc., are either piecemeal cullings at second-hand from a variety of sources hidden, or sup

posed to be hidden, or more audacious pilferings from those vast storehouses of brief facts, memoranda, and opinions in general literature, which are so abundant in all the principal libraries of Germany and France. Of the former species the Koran of Laurence Sterne is, at the same time, one of the most consummately impudent and silly, and it may well be doubted whether a single paragraph of any merit in the whole of it may not be found, nearly verbatim, in the works of some one of his immediate contemporaries. If the Lacon of Mr. Colton is any better, its superiority consists altogether in a deeper ingenuity in disguising his stolen wares, and in that prescriptive right of the strongest, which, time out of mind, has decided upon calling every Napoleon a conqueror, and every Dick Turpin a thief. Seneca, Machiavelli,' Balzac, the author of La Manière de Bien Penser, Bielfeld the German, who wrote in French Les Premiers Traits de l'Erudition Uni verselle, Rochefoucauld, Bacon, Bolingbroke, and especially Burdon, of " materials for thinking " memory, possess, among them, indisputable claims to the ownership of nearly everything worth owning in the book.

Of the latter species of theft we see frequent specimens in the continental magazines of Europe, and

1 It is remarkable that much of what Colton has stolen from Machiavelli was previously stolen by Machiavelli from Plutarch. A MS. book of the Apophthegms of the Ancients, by this latter writer, having fallen into Machiavelli's hands, he put them nearly all into the mouth of the hero, Castruccio Castracani.

occasionally meet with them even in the lower class of periodicals in Great Britain. These specimens are usually extracts, by wholesale, from such works as the Bibliothèques des Memorabilia Literaria, the Recueil des Bonnes Pensées, the Lettres Édifiantes et Curie uses, the Literary Memoirs of Sallengre, the Mélanges Littéraires of Suard and André, or the Pièces Intéress antes et Peu Connues of Laplace. D'Israeli's Curiosi ties of Literature, Literary Character, and Calamities of Authors, have of late years proved exceedingly convenient to some little American pilferers in this line, but are now becoming too generally known to allow much hope of their good things being any longer appropriated with impunity.

Such collections as those of which we have been speaking are usually entertaining in themselves, and for the most part we relish everything about them save their pretensions to originality. In offering, ourselves, something of the kind to our readers, we wish to be understood as disclaiming in a great degree every such pretension. Most of the following article is original, and will be readily recognized as such by the classical and general reader; some portions of it may have been written down in the words, or nearly in the words, of the primitive authorities. The whole is taken from a confused mass of marginal notes and entries in a commonplace-book. No certain arrangement has been considered necessary, and indeed so heterogeneous

a farrago it would have been an endless task to methodize. We have chosen the heading Pinakidia, or Tablets, as one sufficiently comprehensive. It was used for a somewhat similar purpose by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

The whole of Bulwer's elaborate argument on the immortality of the soul, which he has put into the mouth of "The Ambitious Student," may be confuted through the author's omission of one particular point in his summary of the attributes of Deity—a point which we cannot believe altogether omitted through accident. A single link is deficient in the chain, but the chain is worthless without it. No man doubts the immortality of the soul; yet of all truths, this truth of immortality is the most difficult to prove by any mere series of syllogisms. We would refer our readers to the argument here mentioned.

The rude, rough, wild waste has its power to please,

a line in one Mr. Odiorne's poem, The Progress of Re finement, is pronounced by the American author of a book entitled Antediluvian Antiquities "the very best alliteration in all poetry."

Lipsius, in his treatise De Supplicio Crucis, says that the upright beam of the cross was a fixture at the place of execution, whither the criminal was made to

bear only the transverse arm. Consequently the painters are in error who depict our Saviour bearing the entire cross.

The tale in Plato's Convivium, that man at first was male and female, and that, though Jupiter cleft them asunder, there was a natural love toward one another, seems to be only a corruption of the account in Gen esis of Eve's being made from Adam's rib.

Corneille has these lines in one of his tragedies:

Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau,
La moitié de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau,

which may be thus translated:

Weep, weep, my eyes! It is no time to laugh,
For half myself has buried the other half.

Over the iron gate of a prison at Ferrara is this inscription: "Ingresso alla prigione di Torquato Tasso."

The Rabbi Manasseh published a book at Amsterdam entitled The Hopes of Israel. It was founded upon the supposed number and power of the Jews in America. This supposition was derived from a fabulous account by Montesini of his having found a vast concourse of Jews among the Cordilleras.

The word "assassin" is derived, according to Hyle, from Hassa, to kill. Some bring it from "Hassan," the