then freely indulge his fit, either of sulky regret that you should so alienate the goodwill of men by your irregularities and selfishness, or of ungovernable anger at your choosing him for your victim, and his books for your prey. If you have but one pamphlet of his, and he wishes to quarrel, he counts up the gaps in his library, and at once attributes them all to you. But if by some accident you return the novel when it is wanted no longer, equally certain is the provocation. You have packed up his book, and sent it to him "with thanks!" He lent it frankly, cordially, with all his heart, and you return it to him the very next week! Did he ask for it? Did he enter the loan in his note-book? Did you suppose that he was caring more about a trashy fiction than the accommodation of a friend! What could be your meaning! He was the last person whom you should have insulted with that display of cold and punctilious exactness. But he now knows your opinion of him, and can understand your character. He sends you "his compliments" with the next communication.

The quarrelsome always derive one advantage from a long and intimate knowledge of the parties with whom they quarrel. They can cite the particular word or deed, the omission or commission of which they complain, as a specimen of what they have for years borne in unreproaching silence. Give them but the shadow of a pretence for considering themselves slighted, once and but once, and then imagination will immediately help them to a long succession of slights which they have unmurmuringly endured. The immediate offence is but the last link of a chain. It turns out that this is the way they have always been served. They should not mind one unkindness, they can overlook more symptoms of indifference than most people, but to submit to a series of cold-hearted and intentional neglects

demands meekness superhuman; and they must own that even their patience gets tired of sitting on a monument, and smiling night and day, without encouragement and without a witness. Their patience in fact jumps down, and starts off to Donnybrook fair.

The quarrel with strangers includes no such advantage. One cannot very well, even in the full swing of passion, accuse a man whom we have never encountered before, of having insulted us on a hundred occasions. Yet this is desirable, if not necessary. The universal history of rows tells us plainly enough that a simple grievance is never held to be a sufficient ground of battle. It never could content the truly quarrelsome ambition. There must be a compound offence; real or imaginary, it matters not. The principle on which all wellregulated quarrels are conducted, is to "rake up" wrongs, to heap injury upon injury, to pile Pelions upon Ossas. Materials for this are only to be supplied by a prolonged intimacy, if confidential, the better. The mere stranger, therefore, is but a wretched substitute for a valued friend. With the one we must pick our quarrels, with the other we may take them as they come, and still find them "very pretty" contentions. Nevertheless, a shindy with a mere stranger will serve its purpose when a friend is not to be had. To exercise our pugnacity on those for whom we care not a straw, is better than to let our hours waste away in a perpetual dead calm on the Pacific.

As there are two classes wherein the quarrelsome can always find antagonists, so there are two modes of bringing about the desired affray. The one is, to go to the scene which you intend to be the field of battle with a preconceived provocation, a challenge to one particular combatant; the other is, to prepare no plan of assault,

but to rely on the general tone of friendly conversation for the productiveness of animosity.

The first, though seldom liable to total failure, is usually the least successful of the two. We have known experienced and skilful quarrellers fail for hours in finding a bone to pick, even at the table where the best of friends were assembled. It is dangerous at times to make a plant, though your own brother be the object; if you happen to miss your first spring, all the company turn pacificators before the peace is broken at all. If the plan of attack must be premeditated, let it be general; throw out a hint that Nelson was a poor creature, and add, that you never thought Wellington such a very great captain. You will then run very little risk of preserving the peace. Or if alone with an acquaintance, and you fear that the evening might, in spite of his perverseness and irritability, pass away in amity and dulness, begin at once by savagely attacking somebody with whom you know he has quarrelled. He will be pretty sure to start up in defence of the man to whom he bears a grudge, for the sake of a mortal conflict with the man to whom he is attached.

There is an order of men with whom you have but to sympathise, to provoke them to turn upon you. Tell them that they are ill-used, and they will ill-use you. They cannot bear to hear from another's lips the fact they loudly proclaim with their own. If you prostrate yourself in pure devotion to them, they will put their feet upon you where you have thrown yourself. The better mode is, to leave it all to chance. The chapter of accidents is sure to furnish some text for quarrel. When friends assemble to have "a pleasant night of it," the open, candid, cordial "row," is generally but tacitly anticipated as an essential part of

the social entertainment. We confess our enjoyment of it, when we designate it, as the popular phrase emphatically does, "a jolly row." a jolly row." The less you know about its origin the better. The more clearly you understand the circumstances of its rise and progress, the more surely is it brought to an end.

Cassio's quarrel is the thing, he remembers that, "but nothing wherefore." When you begin to comprehend what it is all about, you cease to relish it. The glorious riot then assumes the sober character of reason. A convulsion deliberately got up is well enough in its way; but the unprompted, unpremeditated tumult is better; like parties of pleasure, that are never planned three weeks before date, but start into instantaneous life.

Of the two adversaries, then, the stranger and the friend, which the quarreller will naturally seek, the last is to be preferred; of the two modes of eliciting a contest, that which is least premeditated, and most left to the happy chances of convivial and confidential intercourse, is by much the best. Let him but adhere to these two rules, and the quarreller has the field to himself. He is free from all imputation of malignity in his attack, for he has the sincerest regard for his enemy; he is cleared from every suspicion of slyness and deceit, for his quarrel sprang out of the occasion, and was open as day. He may in this manner pass through life in secure and continual enjoyment of the luxury of embroilment, preserving, with the respect of all men, the very particular esteem of the persons he is at war with. It is only the

"Whispering tongues that poison truth;"

and give hearts once united the likeness of

"Cliffs that have been rent asunder."

Whispered complaints are detestable. It is the open rupture, the bold outspoken abuse of you and yours, the manly honesty that runs you down at Charingcross in the broad noon-day, that constitutes the excellence of the quarrelsome friend. So far from desiring concealment, he begs that you may be informed of it. He goes from Brown to Brown, and from Jones to Jones with the same story.

"I never make a secret of my opinion about him" (no, he gives it unasked). "I always tell him his faults to his face; we are fast friends, and I want all the world to know the fooleries he commits. If it were not for his pride, avarice, and conceit, his habits of toadyism and ridiculous jealousy, together with that unfortunate disregard to truth which I always reminded him of, and that provoking proneness to treachery which everybody must have noticed, he would be the best creature in the world.

"If one could but believe a word he says, no man's conversation would be pleasanter; and if he would but get rid of that selfishness which taints all he does, no man would be capable of better actions. Tell him what I say; he is my old friend, and as you observe, an excellent fellow on the whole; here's his health!"

You trace every ill report against you to this old and excellent friend; but can you help loving, and quarrelling with him?

SOCIETY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF HEARTS.

Ir is a remarkable fact that up to the auspicious moment in which the establishment of this new society, of whose existence and proceedings we have a special report, was conceived for the happiness of man, no