into the club, when an extra blackball would have had a damaging effect upon his reputation. Does he now bear these little services vividly in mind? No; he only bears in mind that you positively declined to take his three gawky nieces to the opera, and distinctly refused to ask that most inveterate of bores, his wife's brother, to stay a fortnight with you in the country.

You have all but fed and clothed him from infancy; does he, all on a sudden, forget this slight obligation? Yes, utterly; you have had a dinner-party that did not include him.

And what tone does he adopt now, when he speaks of the "most generous of men," of the "best friend he ever had in the world?" Oh, the tone of an injured man, to be sure; of a man slow to resent, reluctant to speak out, but deeply injured! "Ah! my dear madam," he remarks to Mrs. Blab, "I thought as you do once; I would have staked my honour on that man's friendship and liberality; but the mean mind, you know, will betray itself. Only think of his refusing to give young Scamp (a relation of mine by marriage), who wants a few suits of clothes, such a simple thing as an introduction to his tailor!" "Shame!" cries Mrs. Blab, on the part of the whole town; "this to you, too, who have been such a friend to him; who have ever spoken of him so highly; to whom he is under so many obligations!"

The receiver of the ninety-nine good turns is not ungrateful at an earlier stage of the obligation. His gratitude never breaks down until it is past the point where the demand for it is higher than ever.

He has been so long accustomed to receive favours, that a temporary stoppage stuns him; and he recovers his senses only to feel that he has been cruelly illtreated. Hitherto, to ask has been to have; the denial, therefore, seems so strange, so wanton, so unprovoked,

that it cancels the recollection of every debt, and turns honey into gall.

When we hear one, with malice and disappointment breathing in every word, imputing to an absent person every disobliging quality, it is not uncharitable to surmise that the absentee had done him many good turns and then stopped. When we have listened a long hour to a fierce railer, who, having fastened his teeth on the character of an old acquaintance, tears it to tatters; who is ready to swear that no particle of kindliness or generosity lurks within the man; who rates him as the impersonation of all meanness and covetousness; it is not always unfair to ask, "How long is it since you first began to borrow of him? and on what day this week did he decline to lend you the guinea?"

Whenever I find any one unusually bitter and boisterous in his denunciations of "man's inhumanity to man," exhibited in a case of personal experience, the declaimer appearing as the victim, I am apt enough to think, "Now, here is a gentleman who wanted the hundredth good turn, but could not get it."

It behoves us surely to take care, when we censure another as incapable of rendering a single service, that we do not mean the hundredth. Many honest natures, that would blush to be deficient in the acknowledgment of kindness, have been precipitated, by an uxexpected refusal, into a total unconsciousness of countless benefits received. There is, it must be owned, something exasperating in this sudden turning-off at the hundredth turn. One is uneasy at receiving ninety-nine obligations and a point-blank denial. Custom has become our second nature, and a repulse seems a wrong. We feel that our benefactor ought to have no will in the matter; that he has a right to comply with our modest little application to give a large party expressly to please

a few particular friends of ours whom he is to ask. Noncompliance dashes us down from the high ladder, when we have attained the last stave but one. Just at the top of the steep ascent, we slip and roll to the bottom when we least dream of it. We had made sure, and feel sore.

Et tu, Brute! we cry. The well that was always brimfull, to find not a drop in it at last! The tree that dropped its ripe fruits for us as we approached, to be barren suddenly! Why, the well that was always empty, the tree that never bore at all, are taken into favour in preference. There is forgiveness for the man who refused at first to stir a foot in our cause, and kept his word; but there is none for him who, having walked a thousand miles to serve us, now declines to move an inch at the bidding of our caprice. Our self-love is wounded by the discovery that we cannot dictate to him; and with pride hurt, we inconsistently humble ourselves to the dust, degraded by the disavowal of obligations we can no longer command.

Even when the spirit of exaction, defeated after many victories, expresses its sense of disappointment in a milder and less revengeful form, it still fails not to draw a distinction between the one who was never obliging, and the one who was always obliging till now, to the prejudice of the last. A favour is received from an unexpected quarter:-" This," we cry, "is most kind, most generous, most noble; he never did me a good turn before." A favour is withheld in a quarter where it was anticipated: "This," we cry, "is unkind to the last degree, most unworthy, most pitiful; he never hesitated to render me a kindness before." Non-desert in the one case makes the single good deed lustrous; desert in the other gives to the solitary refusal the blackness of an irreparable injury.

No man can be perfectly sure that he has not within

him the seeds of an ungrateful scoundrel, until he has been refused the hundredth good turn. If true there, he is a true man.

SENTENCES ON SIMILES.

HAM. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel? POL. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.

HAM. Methinks it is like a weasel.

POL. It is backed like a weasel.

HAM. Or like a whale.

POL. Very like a whale.

Hamlet.

IN estimating the merits of a portrait, there is one condition more essential than the rest; it must be like. Truth of likeness is the first point of excellence. So in the affair of a simile, however employed, whether in an epic poem or in ordinary table-talk, there must be a likeness in the case; some positive point of resemblance between two objects, to warrant the introduction of the ominous word "like."

Portrait-painters, however, in defiance of the imperativeness of the condition specified, often give a preference to an imaginary past likeness over the present, and assume some features of resemblance which probably never existed. Again, in as many instances, they persist in looking forward to a period of similitude, anticipating a likeness to be hereafter recognised.

"Oh, sir," said the disappointed mother, when the artist had finished her child's portrait, "you have done it beautifully indeed, only it is not in the least like my little boy."

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My dear madam," said the far-seeing R. A., "he will grow like it, astonishingly like.”

But the makers of similes, by pen and speech, often proceed upon a plan far more unrestricted than this, which seems nevertheless to have no limit, as it includes with the present the past and future. Their plan appears to be to look for the likeness not merely where it is not, but where it never was and never will be.

Poets, of course, are privileged people; and though not allowed to invent resemblances non-existent and impossible, have a licence to detect in things inward and remote a lurking and most unlikely similarity. Their similes may either imply a likeness immediate, exact, and undeniable, or an analogy existing only in feeling, in sympathy, in the dimness of association, in the impalpable depths of the obscure. Of the two kinds, the latter is the more poetical; and, strange to say, that in this respect swarms of plain prosy people are in their hourly household discourse poetical exceedingly.

Where can one turn for an hour's chat, east or west of the city; on what topic can we hold a ten minutes' gossip either with the busy or the idle, the rough or the refined, the matter-of-fact or the imaginative; and not find a passion for seeking resemblances, for pursuing similes under difficulties, breaking out at every second sentence of the conversation? Why, the habit of hunting up similitudes is universal. These are the likes that beget likes.

Some matter-of-fact man took the pains once, it is said, to count up the number of similes scattered by Moore over the "Life of Sheridan;" but did the cunning critic skilled in Cocker, though probably blessing his stars, as he read over his own naked prose, that he was no poet, ever tax his arithmetic so far as to count up the number of similes and no similes he himself might be heard to let drop, in the course of one day's