civilized world,—that portion of intelligence, morality, and Christianity, which has been practically embodied in life and active power. It destroys pretense and quackery, and tests genius and heroism. It changes with the progress of society; persecutes in one age what it adopts in the next; its martyrs of the sixteenth century are its precedents and exponents of the nineteenth; and a good part of the common sense of an elder day is the common nonsense of our own."

"The history of human opinions," said Voltaire, "is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors."

John Foster, in one of his thoughtful essays, has this suggestive passage: "If a reflective, aged man were to find at the bottom of an old chest—where it had lain forgotten fifty years—a record which he had written of himself when he was young, simply and vividly describing his whole heart and pursuits, and reciting verbatim many passages of the language which he sincerely uttered, would he not read it with more wonder than almost every other writing could at his age inspire? He would half lose the assurance of his identity, under the impression of this immense dissimilarity. It would seem as if it must be the tale of the juvenile days of some ancestor, with whom he had no connection but that of name." Said Swift, "If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last." Says Montaigne, "Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in several men, but in the same men, at different times." Says Pope, "What is every year of a wise man's life but a censure or critique on the past? Those whose date is the shortest live long enough to laugh at one half of it; the boy despises the infant; the man, the boy; the philosopher, both; and the Christian, all." Diet, health, the weather, affairs,—a thousand things,—determine our views. "I knew a witty physician," says Emerson, "who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian." Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world. Our views change so often that the writer who would be consistent would never write at all. The sentence that would express his thought at one time would fail at another. Alteration would only confuse. An attempt to find words to express his thoughts upon any one thing at all times would be given up in despair. Voltaire once praised another writer very heartily to a third person. "It is very strange," was the reply, "that you speak so well of him, for he says you are a charlatan." "Oh," replied Voltaire, "I think it very likely that both of us are mistaken." A day or two after the production of one of Sheridan's comedies, a friend met the author, and told him he had seen Cumberland at the theatre on its representation. "Ah, well," replied Sheridan, "What did he say to it?" "He wasn't seen to smile from the beginning to the end of the comedy," said the friend. "Come, now, that's very ungrateful of him," retorted Sheridan, "for I went to see his tragedy the other evening, and laughed through the whole of it." Smith gives an account of a lady in weeds for her husband who came drooping like a willow to Nollekens, the sculptor, desiring a monument, and declaring that she did not care what money was expended on the memory of one she loved so. "Do what you please, but, oh, do it quickly!" were her parting orders. Nollekens went to work, made the design, finished the model, and began to look for a block of marble to carve it from, when in dropped the lady; she had been absent some three months. "Poor soul," said the sculptor, when she was announced, "I thought she would come soon, but I am ready." The lady came light of foot, and lighter of look. "Ah, how do you do, Mr. Nollekens? Well, you have not commenced the model?" "Ay, but I have, though," returned the sculptor, "and there it stands, finished!" "There it is, indeed," sighed the lady, throwing herself into a chair; they looked at each other for a minute's space or so—she spoke first; "These, my good friend, are, I know, early days for this little change,"—she looked at her dress, from which the early profusion of crape had disappeared,—"but since I saw you, I have met with an old Roman acquaintance of yours who has made me an offer, and I don't know how he would like to see in our church a monument of such expense to my late husband. Indeed, on second thought, it would be considered quite enough if I got our mason to put up a mural tablet, and that, you know, he can cut very prettily." "My charge, madam, for the model," said the sculptor, "is one hundred guineas." "Enormous! enormous!" said the lady, but drew out her purse, and paid it. The mutability of human nature! Change, change is the rule. Flaxman, when he was in Rome, lived at a sort of chocolate house kept by three girls who were so elegant as to be called "the Graces." They lived to be so old that they were called "the Furies." A distinguished painter has said, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression. "I have seen several pictures of Garrick," said Macaulay, "none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished." "I wish the world, James," said Christopher North to the Ettrick Shepherd, "would stand still for some dozen years—till I am at rest. It seems as if the very earth itself were undergoing a vital change. Nothing is unalterable, except the heaven above my head, and even it, James, is hardly, methinks, at times, the same as in former days or nights. There is not much difference in the clouds, James, but the blue sky, I must confess, is not quite so very blue as it was sixty years since; and the sun, although still a glorious luminary, has lost a leetle—of his lustre." Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne, says he saw a cock-bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors. In about a year it began to look dingy; and blackening each succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp seed. Such influence has food on the color of animals! Darwin, in his Voyage, says that the wild cattle in East Falkland Island, originally the same stock, differ much in color; and that in different parts of that one small island, different colors predominate. He remarked that the difference in the prevailing colors was so obvious, that in looking at the herds from a point near Point Pleasant, they appeared from a long distance like black spots, whilst south of Choiseul Sound they appeared like white spots on the hill-sides. Round Mount Usborne, at a height of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet above the sea, about half of some of the herds are mouse or lead colored. "From the westward till you get to the river Adur," observed White, "all the flocks have horns and smooth white faces, and white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen; but as soon as you pass that river eastward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at once become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep; and have, moreover, black faces, with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, and speckled and spotted legs, so that you would think that the flocks of Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated breed of his son-in-law, Jacob, were cantoned along on the