People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism. I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say that this boy, our 10 landlady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly merited compliment.) pered something about the Macaulayflowers of literature? There was a dead silence. I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a 5 hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We have done with them. - If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? I should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, which couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I 25 value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand truth, I wished to refer to two eminent au- 15 thorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great moralist says: To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who 20 would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.' And, once more, listen to the historian. The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its 30 Royal quibble. "Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh," said Queen Elizabeth, "but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester." The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their 35 sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theater, remarked, that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. "Thou hast reason," replied a great Lord, 45 "according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-legged animal with feathers." The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Politi- 50 cal double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the 55 Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts.' Who was that boarder that just whis - not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a clever debater, any more than that of a good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles or plays well. The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot, at the expression, his relations with truth as I understand truth,' and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him. Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, as you understand it. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of things or persons. A man who is willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one's self. On the whole, I had rather judge men's minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other. It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior mind that held a different one. How many of our most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of mora, in which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers 10 extended, and the other matches or misses the number, as the case may be. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate 15 avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an instrument is to playing on it. What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of verses, 20 with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can retire that like. ALBUM VERSES When Eve had led her lord away, To cheat the cunning tempter's art, A million sleepless lids, they say, And so the flowers would watch by day, On hill and prairie, field and lawn, The flowers still watch from reddening dawn Alas! each hour of daylight tells A tale of shame so crushing, That some turn white as sea-bleached shells, But when the patient stars look down The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown, They try to shut their saddening eyes, What do you think of these verses my friends? Is that piece an impromptu? said my landlady's daughter. (t. 19 +. Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. 5 Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says, ' Yes?' when you tell her anything.)- Oui et non, ma petite,- Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses were written offhand; the other two took a week,- that is, were hanging around the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrimed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C'est le DERNIER pas qui coûte. Don't you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlor or study, and were waiting to be 25 launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down. metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, 30 into their native element,' the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the reserviceable rimes, day, ray, beauty, duty, 35 skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of 40 the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many impromptus' could tell just such a story as the above.45 Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. Madam,' I said, you can pour three gills and three quar50 ters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside 55 down for a thousand years.' One gets tired to death of the old, old rimes, such as you see in that copy of verses, which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles. youth morning truth warning. Nine tenths of the Juvenile Poems' written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences. "Yes?' said our landlady's daughter. I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbor. 5 10 15 When a young female wears a flat 20 circular side-curl, gummed on each temple, when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers, and when she says 'Yes?' with the note of interrogation, you are generally 25 safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the feller' was you saw her with. 'What were you whispering?' said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, 30 as she spoke, in a very engaging manner. 'I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.' 'Yes?' -It is curious to see how the same 35 wants and tastes find the same implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal 40 in radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a BayState shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A blanket- 45 shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders. -We are the Romans of the modern world, the great assimilating people. 50 Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; 55 and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress: The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries. Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound. 'Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!' What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best passage in the 'Pleasures of Hope.' Self-made men? Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects selfmade men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a self-made' carpenter's house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on. Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other, that is another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, other things being equal, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family. What do I mean by a man of family? O, I'll give you a general idea of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing. Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of long boots with tassels. Family portraits. The member of the 10 Council, by Smibert. The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his commercial transac- 15 tions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honorable, etc., etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand 20 old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-blown, mediæval gentleman, with a fiery dash of 25 Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of 30 his bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants. 2. 35 Lady of the same; remarkable cap: high waist, as in time of Empire; bust à la Josephine; wisps of curls, like celerytips, at sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for 40 the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the gallery. Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,- family names; you will find them at the head of their 45 respective classes in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents' condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and Hic liber est meus on the title- 50 page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos. Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt. 5 If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished with claw-foot chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete. No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, that have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear professor over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. - I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they have n't. Perhaps you would like 55 to hear my LATTER-DAY WARNINGS When legislators keep the law, When banks dispense with bolts and locks, When berries, whortle-, rasp-, and straw-, Grow bigger downwards through the box, When he that selleth house or land Shows leak in roof or flaw in right.When haberdashers choose the stand Whose window hath the broadest light, When preachers tell us all they think, When lawyers take what they would give, I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one 15 that was talking good things,-good enough to print? Why,' said he, you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.' The And doctors give what they would take.- 20 talker took him to the window and asked When city fathers eat to live, Save when they fast for conscience' sake,— When one that hath a horse on sale That holds the iron on the hoof, When in the usual place for rips him to look out and tell him what he saw. Nothing but a very dusty street,' he said, and a man driving a sprinklingmachine through it.' 25' Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes? Our gloves are stitched with special care, 30 And guarded well the whalebone tips Where first umbrellas need repair, 'Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us; the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the 35 image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,- you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modeling. Out of it comes the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, 45 to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; - but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it.' The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others occa- 50 sionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I 55 have not taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, père, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but they were The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, Fust-rate.'- I acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. Fust-rate,' 'prime,'' a prime article,' ' a superior piece of goods,' a handsome garment,' 'a gent |