favored. My daughter-in-baptism, Sir;-Mary, this is Mr. C., who promises to surpass thee as a patient listener, child:-nay, no incredulous smile; 'tis honest verity, I vow. We practice here, Sir, no "fashion or ceremony-the appurtenance of welcome," as Hamlet hath it; and had " the old sexton, Time," plyed his pickaxe less ruthlessly parmi les dents, I'd sing you a strain of welcome, shrill as Sir Fred's. Seriously, Madam, is our parlour becoming a republic?-these yellow villains take unbounded licence when the Lodge is under female government, and I may as well go whistle to the wind as call the rioters to order.-Have done, ye chartists! Prithee fetch wool, good Mary, wool, for the ears of Mr. C.— I have cause to be concerned for a faculty of hearing so long-suffering!"

There be some that say, Who will show us any good? Of course on the ears of such the Priest's and the Poet's representations fall alike heavily, and either do not reach the heart or awaken in it no willing response. For the health's sake of the mass, such disaffectedness before heaven and before man should be treated as of old was leprosy-the victim isolated from the herd, and left in solitude to inspire the

malaria of his own breath. Priests have their note of terror to sound and re-sound; but ere its echoes cease to vibrate on the awed ear of Conscience, the strain swells into triumph, and lifts the creature, just now depressed, from the tombs of Palmyra to the top of Pisgah-from the survey of ruins to the recognition of a present large fruition and to the sublime expectancies of Hope. "The priestly Guide for me," says mine ancient friend," is him who leads, not drives; and who, as we travel onwards through the valley of the shadow, has a smile for its sweet-scented flowers, and takes comfort in them as types of a richer produce. Still the pastoral guide must check the admiration that would suggest a folding of the hands to slumber and the impulse to seek a long repose there; for the valley has its

"sunken glens, whose sunless shrubs must weep,"

and down from the steep hills will, at some hour, sternly sweep the Storm on the unwary who would insist on patient rest despite the warnings of the wise. But the poet-teacher is under no grave coercion to reiterate the solemn cry, "All flesh is grass and the glory thereof as the flower:" to him, whose mission leads him out among God's works that he may report

their language, there is a delectable compulsion to be cheerful-ay, and if the charms of the progeny he adopts excite more praiseful pride than reverend oracles consider orthodox, let such heterodoxy be castigated by the Clergy: though the priesthood hath in it many favorers-in our own list of friends, one eloquent supporter of the heresy, who-forgive him, Gracious Queen! and be lenient, my Lord Bishop of London!-has, in this ivied cell, drawn comparisons between the attire worn in palaces and the petals of a pale lily, at which, though derogatory to royal robes, the lovely Mistress of the royal wardrobe could not for her life have frowned. The old Clerk, may it not displease your Majesty, is heartwhole in his loyalty-his offering of our Mother's Petitions for the Queen attest that;-and an Illustrious Precedent, my Lord Bishop, will reconcile you to a faithful Shepherd, whose anxious eye but seldom wanders from his fold, and who distils a wondrous medicinal property from simple flowers seen in bypaths and in the fields wherein his lambs have their pasturage."

Really this digression originally proposed, and now re-proposes, but one brief moment's "aside" from the Elder in his mirth, to ejaculate, as travellers are wont to do at sudden introductions to sweet landscapes on

the highroad," A pleasant prospect!" or " A charming scene!" Who will show us any good, indeed! Why on the right reverend finding of Bishop Hall eleven excellent things have been discovered and triumphantly proclaimed, one of which has reference to "a cheerful companion without vanity;"-par excellence, I take it, a religious old man mirthful. Why the bishop halted in his inventory on the deficient side of a dozen, and yet left out of his catalogue the talk of very young children, is a circumstance which the editor of the next edition of his Life will oblige us by explaining. Bishop Taylor would never have omitted that item in his list of good and pleasant things. That admirable priest alludes specially to the allegro movements of a father's heart in the hearing of such "pretty conversation:" let the man remodel himself without delay to whom such conversation proves no pleasure. Of sublunary joys, second perhaps to that which "stands alone, like Adam's recollection of the Fall,” is the racy dialect of one's firstborn in its early efforts at elocution. So, at a subsequent stage, pregnant with pleasure is the wild shout of careless childhood-the glad eye kindling at the call to revelry. Nor, when tempered by an instructed mind, less pleasant is it to witness glee in a guileless old

age;—a comfortable sign it is of enduring verdure about the venerable tree against which Time has upheaved his iron arm indestructively;—a cheering testimony that the advances of Decay and approximation of the Grave have brought no gloomy Winter to the soul; a welcome earnest rather, to the hoary traveller, of the calm of a protracted Autumn, submerging at last into the glories of an eternal Spring.

E-If Regret could possibly to-day find entrance into Ivy Lodge, her only plea were this-that you came not earlier, and have thus lost intercourse with a revered friend of mine, the Rector of a neighbouring parish. Mr. F. is, like myself, a sexagenarian; and my views on church polity and construction of doctrine coincide with his in every particular. Have you ever met with persons with whom you felt a pleasure—an active pleasure in differing; and others, with whom to disagree was to maintain integrity at the expense of real regret? Mr. F. is, in my circle of acquaintance, of this latter class; a man of so much worth and sound judgment that it would be grief to me to differ from him. Then we are both thorough sticklers for the excellency of Holy Mother; but though her reverend son and servant will not bate one jot to her