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LANGUAGE participates of the passions and emotions which it describes. In the early periods of society the human mind was alternately agitated with violent emotions, or depressed with sullen despondency: silence is the usual attendant of the one, ardent, bold, and figurative language that of the other. Strong and bold language is necessary to express violent feelings and impetuous passions. The strong passions displayed in the uncultivated state of society, or among the rude and ignorant, have produced that lively and picturesque description, that splendid and bold imagery with which the songs and orations of ancient poets and orators abound. The effusions of fancy, the sallies of the imagination, and the war of the passions, unchecked by the improvement of reason, and the acquisition of knowledge.

The uncultivated nations carried on their public transactions, and mediated their treaties with greater pomp, and with bolder metaphors, than the moderns employ in their poetical compositions. A treaty of peace between Great Britain and the five nations of Canada, afford an instance of this kind, which is expressed in the following language:—“ We are happy in having buried under the ground the red axe that has so often been dyed with the blood of our brethren. Now in this manner we inter the axe, and plant the tree of peace. We plant a tree, whose tops will reach the sun, and its branches spread abroad, so that it shall be seen afar off. May its growth never be stifled and choked; but may it shade both your country and ours with its leaves! Let us make fast his roots, and extend them to the utmost of your colonies. If the enemy should come to shake this tree, we would know it by the motion of its roots reaching into our country. May the Great Spirit allow us to rest in tranquillity upon our mats, and never again dig up the axe to cut down the tree of peace! Let the earth be trode hard over it, where it lies buried. Let a strong stream run under the pit, to wash the evil away out of our right and remembrance. The fire that has long burned in Albany is extinguished. The blood that has bedewed the ground is washed clean away, and the tears are wiped from our eyes. We now renew the covenant claim of friendship. Let it be kept bright and clean as silver, and not suffered to contract any rust. Let not any one pull away his arm from it." Such was the language in which these untutored nations expressed their national treaties.

The general principle formerly mentioned,

that language corresponds to the degree of mental cultivation, is farther confirmed by the style of the Old Testament, which is the most ancient composition in existence. It is stored with the boldest metaphors, and the most poetical expressions. The figurative descriptions, and the violent expressions of passion with which the writings of Ossian abound, are proofs both of their antiquity, and of the complexion of the character of the poet. The untaught Shakspeare is unrivalled in the sphere in which he moved. And to the same cause may be attributed the excellence and the popularities of Burns and Hogg, the two Scottish poets.

ANECDOTES OF THE INSANE.

A WRONG sensation does not constitute a person insane. He may have "double vision;" he may see two fingers, when only one is held up; yet he is not on that account insane. Neither if a person see images,-figures,spectres, is he insane, if he do not believe their existence is real. Some persons see and they know that such things do not exist; images of objects which have no existence; and therefore they are not insane. They are aware that it is a mere deception. Some see appearances of human beings, brutes, and various animals; but they are perfectly aware that it is entirely the effect of disease. One of the most remarkable instances of this description occurred at Berlin; in the person of a bookseller named Nicolai. He saw, at certain times, an immense number of living objects; but he was aware that it was all the effect of unhealthy excitement. He had gone through considerable mental application; and being aware that this was all a delusion, he was no more insane for seeing them, than a person would be for thinking he saw two fingers, when you held up but one. You know that Brutus and Socrates are said to have seen, the one the shade of Cæsar, and the other the "familiar spirit," as he called it; but if neither the one nor the other believed this, or if they merely believed it in accordance with the belief of the day, they were not mad; but if they knew better, and yet believed these things, then they were deranged. But in a great number of cases of insanity, you find an absurd belief. Persons may believe something so preposterous, that everybody will consider them mad for so doing. A case is recorded of a butcher, who firmly believed he saw a leg of mutton hangHe was certainly mad. ing from his nose. Another is told of a baker, who fancied himself butter; and refused to go into the sunshine, lest he should melt. A painter thought he was transformed into putty; and that he could not walk without being com

Condensed from the forthcoming Lectures of Dr. Elliotson, edited by Dr. Rogers.

pressed. Others have fancied themselves glass; and would not sit down lest they

should crack. Luther furnished an instance of an absurd opinion of this description; for, though so able a man, he was mad on some points. He fancied himself possessed by the devil, as did also the Roman Catholics; and that he heard him speak. In Hudibras there is the following couplet in reference to this circumstance:

"Did not the dev'l appear to Martin

Luther in Germany, for certain ?" Luther, in his works, speaks of the devil appearing to him frequently; and says he used to drive him away by scoffing and jeering-observing that the devil, being a proud spirit, cannot bear to be contemned and scoffed. Some popish writers affirmed that Luther was the offspring of " an incubus," a kind of young devil; and that at length, when he died, he was strangled by the devil. Dr. Ferriday, of Manchester, had a patient of the same persuasion as Luther. He fancied he had swallowed the devil. Many persons fancy that there are frogs and serpents within them; and one woman fancied that a whole regiment of soldiers was within her. One man fancied he was too large to go through a door-way; and on being pulled through he screamed, and fancied he was being lacerated; and actually died of the fright. A woman fancied she had been dead, and had been sent back to the world without a heart, and was the most miserable of God's creatures. At the Friends" Retreat," near York, one patient writes," I have no soul. I have neither heart, liver, nor lungs; nor a drop of blood in my veins. My bones are all burnt to a cinder. I have no brain; and my head is sometimes as hard as iron, and sometimes as soft as a pudding." Another patient in the "Retreat" wrote the following verses in reference to this hypochondriac:

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A miracle, my friends, come view!—
A man (admit his own words true)
Who lives without a soul.
Nor liver, lungs, nor heart has he;
Yet sometimes cau as cheerful be

As if he had the whole.

His head (take his own words along)
Now hard as iron, yet ere long

Is soft as any jelly.

All burnt his sinews aud his lungs ;
Of his complaints not fifty tongues
Could find enough to tell ye!

Yet he who paints his likeness here,
Has just as much himself to fear

He's wrong from top to toe.
Ah, friends, pray help us, if you can!
And make us each again a man;

That we from heuce may go !"

One man, in the time of the first French Revolution, thought he had not got his own head. He is described in Moore's "Fudge Family at Paris." Mr. Fudge says;——

"Went to the mad-house. Saw the man

of discord here full riot rau)

Who thinks,-poor wretch-that (while the Bendi

He, like the rest, was guillotined; But that when, under Boney's reign,

(A more discreet, though quite as strong one) The heads were all restored again,

He, in the scramble, got a wrong oue..

Accordingly, he still cries out,-

This strange head fits him most unpleasantly!
And always runs,-poor dev'll-about,
Inquiring for his own incessantly.”

Bishop Warburton, in a note to one of his works, speaks of a person who thought he was converted into a goose-pie. Pope, in his "Rape of the Lock," describes many of these fancies. He says, in giving a sketch of hypochondriacal persons,— "Unnumber'd throngs on every side are seen, Of bodies changed to various forms by spleen. Here living tea-pots stand; one arm held out, One bent-the haudle this, and that the spout. A pipkin here, like Homer's tripod, walks; Here sighs a jar, and there a goose-pie talks." A man in the University of Oxford fancied himself dead, and lay in bed, waiting for the tolling of the bell; but not hearing it at the time he expected, he fell into a violent passion, and ran and tolled it himself. He was then spoken to on the absurdity of a dead man tolling his own bell; and it is said that he returned, and was afterwards sound in his intellect. Simon Brown, a dissenting minis ter, wrote the best answer to Findal's work, entitled, "Christianity as Old as the Creation;" but, notwithstanding the great pow ers of mind displayed in his work, he thought that, by the judgment of God, his rational soul had perished; and that he had only brute-life. He absolutely inserted this in the dedication of his work to the Queen. This dedication, however, was afterwards sup pressed. Baron Swedenborg, a very learned and able man, thought that he had had communications with God for thirty years; and that he had been shown by the Almighty, the mysteries of nature. Many think he was right; but no one could have that idea without insanity. It is similar to the case of the celebrated Pascal; who, while he was working the problem of the cycloid curve, with great powers of intellect, was tied (by his own desire) in a chair; lest he should fall into a yawning gulf, which he imagined to be before him.

HIGHLAND FREEDOM.

Ir is a singular fact, that the Gaelic is perhaps the only European language in which there is no word to express slavery: it has no word synonymous to slave. The lowest clans-man was of the blood of the chief, or was admitted to the same right as that re lationship would have procured him. His attachment and obedience to the chief were most devoted; but they were exalted by that

noble spirit which the feeling of a community in blood and in honour must always inspire.

Manners and Customs.

SKETCHES OF PARIS.

The Quartier Latin. SITUATED on the unfashionable side of the Seine, in the eleventh arrondissement, and comprising in its limits the Rue St. Jacques, Rue de la Harpe, and the Rue l'Ecole de Medicine, is the Quartier Latin. It is a part of Paris little known to the English visitors. They approach its boundaries when they visit the Luxembourg, and penetrate into its very heart at the Pantheon and Sorbonne, but beyond this they know no more of it. The aristocratical inhabitant of the Chassée D'Antin has heard of such a place, and that is all; but he would be as great a stranger in its localities, and feel as much at ease, as a West End exquisite would among the stalls and sheds of the New Cut. And yet there are things worth seeing there, and we would make bold to affirm that one-half of the promoters of the real gaiety of Paris reside within its limits. Nor is sport the only matter of interest to be found there; for the student, there is the Sorbonne and its quiet halls; for the sight-seeker, the Pantheon, with its ambitious monuments and gloomy vaults, that even the torch starting from the tomb of Jean Jacques Rousseau cannot illumine; for the antiquary, the remains of the Roman baths in the Rue de la Harpe, and their curiously suspended floors; and for every body, the venerable and highly interesting Hotel de Cluny, with its ancient architecture of the moyen age, its still bright armour, its curiously-fashioned windows breaking the sunbeams into one hundred different forms upon its oaken floors, and its almost affecting domestic relics of other days, recalling, with mute eloquence, their owners, long since released from all care and passions, whose very names even have passed away.

But it is not about these edifices that we wish to talk-the Quartier Latin derives its interest to us from other sources-from the present instead of the past. In a word, it is the abode, the hive, perhaps, would be a better term, leaving industry alone, of almost all the students of law and medicine in Paris. Much has been written, and more promulgated, about the medical students of London, and wild legends of harmonic meetings, half-and-half, gossamer hats, and unpaid lodgings, have been whispered in their praise or dishonour, (whichever you like,) but they are nothing to their brethren of France. We think it is very lucky that there is a quartier for them, especially in Paris, or we do not suppose the walls of that city would contain them, to say nothing of the iron gates at the

barriers. And yet their fun is peculiarthey have none of the lamp-breaking, knocker-stealing, sign-destroying, pranks of the English; but at the public balls and fétes they shine pre-eminent. You may soon know them, for they can be mistaken for nothing else. Look at these three coming arm-and-arm along the Rue de l'Ecole de Medicine. They are well dressed in their way, but seem to have a sovereign contempt for hats-caps are the reigning fashion of the Quartier Latin. One has a scarlet waistcoat and lavender pantaloons; another has a cap of the same bright colour, worn on the back of his head, and bagging down behind; and the third has a garment something between a blouse and a shooting-jacket, denominated a paletot. All have pipes in their mouths, which they doggedly keep there, removing them only to address some bright-eyed little grisette, who happens to pass at the moment. Their long hair is well arranged, (for they take out cachets with M. Etienne in the same street, " pour la coiffure ou la barbe," at the rate of twelve tickets for two francs and a half,) and they all wear mustachios, which meet their pointed beards like the old portraits at Versailles and Windsor Castle. They are going to the Café Dupuytren to have a glass of absinthe before dinner, and then we wager they will turn round the corner to dine at Viot's, or Rous. seau's, at the expense of one franc each, including a sou for the waiter.

But it is not only the students that favour the Quartier Latin with their patronagethe grisettes of Paris have likewise made it their home. And what is a grisette? Why, courteous reader, (as Francis Moore says,) we are almost as much puzzled as you would be to explain, and yet we always know them when we meet them. Do you see that little girl whom the student just bowed to-she is a grisette. She is about eighteen, small figure, but perfectly shaped, with dark eyes, brown hair, and tolerably small feet. Her dress consists of a dark gown, fitting tight at the arms, from the shoulder to the wrist, in the style of Louis XV.; a striped shawl put on in a style that only Frenchwomen can accomplish; a little apron, with pockets, and a pretty black net cap, with crimson ribbons. She carries a little square basket, and an umbrella, and although the streets are very dirty, there is not a splash on her neat chaussure. She is a brocheuse, i. e. she makes up the paper-covered French books, and her pay is thirty sous a-day. She works hard all the week, and goes to the balls at the barriers on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays, in the evening, when she displays a smarter dress than ordinary, and has, moreover, a pair of black net gloves. How all this is done out of thirty sous a-day, we do not ask-it is her business, not ours; but we have met them at the markets in the

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morning, buying certainly more provisions than would suffice for their own meals; and we have seen them walking in the gardens of the Luxembourg with students of our acquaintance, whose menage we always thought particularly neat and well arranged; and we have strong doubts as to whether these young housekeepers do not sometimes look after other domestic economy, besides their own. Mind, reader, we say we have only suspected it-no more.

The respectable and sentimental old gentleman who journeyed to France with a pair of silk culottes and the coat he had on, has left us an account of his adventure with a grisette who looked him into buying a pair of gloves; perhaps those of the present day look their admirers into buying caps and shawls for them-it is not improbable. They are, moreover, very attractive, those little grisettes; "elles sont si fraiches, si gentille," as Paul de Kock says, and they waltz delightfully, to make no mention of galops and quadrilles.

But these are not the only characteristics of the Quartier Latin. It is a great resort of the Marchands d'habits, or old clothesmen, as we impolitely term them in Eugland. One would think they have a great business amongst the students, since they possess an astonishing prediliction for the streets about the Ecole de Medicine and Pantheon; and the garments they carry are not generally of that peculiar threadbare and ragged fashion which we see in England. Then there are also perambulating sellers of almost every thing at a certain price, and a strange collection of articles their long barrows present, all or any of which may be bought for five sous each. Plates, knives, whips, decanters, whistles, pins, brushes, lucifers, looking-glasses, almanacks, pencils; in fact, an endless variety of wares. It is needless to add, that all are of inferior manufacture, or more or less damaged, but they do for the housekeepers of the Quartier Latin.

with its white eyeballs. Cheap restaurateurs abound here also, where you can dine at any price you like under thirty sous; we say under, for you would find a difficulty in eating more than you could purchase for that sum, unless you had the stomach of M. Bikin, the Belgian giant of Franconi's, who stands eight feet in his tinsel sandals, and fights twelve men at once. Fortune befriend him at the Adelphi-we have not seen him there, but we are sure he must resemble the dwarfs in the little houses outside the shows at our fairs, which formerly, in the innocence of our imagination, we believed to be divided into parlours and bedrooms for their wonderful occupant. If you prefer eating at home, you can purchase cold fowls in some of the shops, and sausages of every manufacture in the world. Lodgings are also to be ebtained at low rates in the Quartier Latin, the price diminishing from twentyfive to ten francs a-month, as you ascend the stairs" in inverse proportion," as we used to say of the radiation of caloric, when we studied Turner's Chemistry. The rooms are always the same in appearance. A tiled floor, a French bed, a good looking-glass, with drawers, secretary and table, all furnished with dark marble slabs, and sometimes a vase of artificial flowers, or an alabaster clock, with a gilt dial, on the mantel-piece. From this picture you may imagine all the rest, for they are all alike, except that in winter a stove is added, being a curious compound of iron and crockery-ware, with a tin chimney. And we have passed very happy evenings in those little rooms-happier, perchance, than we may see again, for we were entirely our own masters, and had little to annoy or worry us. At that time we could cook beefsteaks over small earthenware furnaces; we could also boil peas, make omelettos, and fry potatoes, when pecuniary embarrassments compelled us to dine at homea circumstance not uncommon among the students of Paris; nay, more, we have set out to purchase our own charcoal, and brought it home in a basket, for you must not live in the Quartier Latin, unless you can do every thing for yourself. In fine, it is a little world of its own creating a spirit of laisser-aller und independence reigns in it, and you may walk about all day in a cap and blouse, without losing caste.

The shops of this part of the world are ge nerally in keeping with the inhabitants. We often wondered why there were so many stores for little jean boots and net gloves so near the Musée Dupuytren, and dissecting-rooms there to attached, but that was during our early days at Paris, when every thing was a source of astonishment. Nevertheless, there are many shops for such gear, in spite of the dreary locality, and these are only exceeded by hairdressers at fifty centimes, (five pence,) and tobacco shops, whose windows display a dazzling array of bowls and sticks for pipes of all possible shapes and forms, generally, To the young prattler how I split the bark however, bearing the image of an Indian's head, with glass eyes let into the clay, so that when the pipe is well "culottée,” i. e. blackened by constant smoking, an cccupation of which the students are immensely fond, the head looks very fierce and imposing,

WINTER.

KNIPS.

GATHER around your blazing hearths, and tell
Dread stories of my power, for, lo! I come
To howl above your happy roof-recount

On the dark ocean's breast, and yell a dirge
O'er the young sea-boy's grave; tell of the blights
I cast upon the flowery fields, of all
The dazzling splendour of the rising sun,
When on my frosty robes he looks, and darts
His golden beams upon my coronal.

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BENLOMOND.

BENLOMOND is justly admired as one of the most beautiful and interesting mountains in the kingdom. It is inferior to several in height, but its locality renders it more conspicuous than the lofty summits of the neighbouring mountains: the gradual acclivity, from the extended base of the mountain to the cloud-capt peak, gives a pleasant and beautiful outline, and the extensive and awfully sublime prospect commanded from the summit, awaken sensations of grandeur and sublimity. Situated in Stirlingshire, at the south-west extremity of the Grampian mountains, and forming, on this side, the frontier of the West Highlands, whose serrated mountain tops, viewed from the east and south, in the distance recede from the view, and Benlomond, touring in the front like a giant stands,

"To sentinel enchanted laud.'

The gradual acclivity, which, at a distance, gives the beautiful outline to the figure of the mountain, affords, comparatively, an agreeable ascent to the traveller, to whom the horizon extends at every step, and presents an infinite variety of landscape, till he reaches the top, and then comes the reward of his toil. The highest point of Benlomond is 3,250 feet above the level of the lake, which is 32 above the level of the sea. Benlomond has this remarkable merit as a hill, that it is not overcrowned or crowded up with surrounding hills. It seems to be sole monarch of a vast undisputed territory. Nowhere, therefore, is there a better idea to be obtained of the Highland country than on its summit. The mountain itself, besides, affords a great variety of scenery. To the south it stretches out into a slope of a very gentle declivity. The north side is awfully abrupt, and presents a concave pre

cipice of many hundred yards in depth. He must possess firm nerves who can approach the brink and look down unmoved. The rock is said to be 2,000 feet in sheer descent. The stranger, with all his very natural and allowable terrors for his person, on coming within a few yards of the edge, will be astonished, and almost pained to learn, that a celebrated Highland hero of yore, supposed to be described in the Lady of the Lake under the name of Malcolm Græme, used to attest his fearlessness of character, by standing on the brink of this steep-down gulf, sustained only by the heel of one of his feet, the rest of the foot projecting over!

Among this group of mountains, Ben Crouachan looks conspicuous, and farther north, Ben Nevis raises its loftier head. On the north-east, the valleys of the Grampian hills, studded with silvery lakes, gradually relieve the mind from the awfully deep sensations, inspired by the dark hills of the north. The level country on the east and south, interspersed with wood and lawn, and meandering streams, while everywhere the smoke, rising in fleecy clouds, marks an encreasing town or village, and the populous cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow gleam in the sunshine, brings the mind back to an equilibrium,-to the contemplation of objects of humanity, and the arts of civilization. Here the eye revels in the richness of the objects spread before it, till the mind is delightfully awakened, by the termination of the view between the landscape and sky, to contemplate the vast expanse of heaven, and with fervent and sublime feelings,

"Look through Nature up to Nature's God." In the west, the counties of Renfrew are seen stretched along the west shores of the Frith of Clyde-the Islands of Arran and

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