Oh, Peace! Knocks will not cease. Oh, Peace! thou wert for human comfort plann’d— Oh, Peace! how glad I welcome thy approaches— Oh, Peace! oh, Peace!—another carriage stops- Oh, Peace! with thee I love to wander, But wait till I have show'd up Lady Squander; Oh, Peace!--but here comes Captain Hare. Where tumult never makes an entry Susan? What business have you in my pantry? Oh, Peace!--but there is Major Monk I have no peace to write of Peace. NOTE.-Van der Trunk.-Van is the Dutch prefix; Von (of) is the German. ON BOOKS.-Goldsmith. Oliver Goldsmith, a delightful poet, essayist, &c., was born at Pallas, Ireland, in 1728, and died in London in 1774. He is buried in the open space north of the Temple Church. He was one of the kindest and simplest of men. Reynolds would not enter his painting-room the day Goldsmith died, so deep was his regret for him. This extract is from the "Citizen of the World." Every one knows his "Traveller," &c. You are now arrived at an age, my son, when pleasure dissuades from application; but rob not by present gratification all the succeeding period of life of its happiness. Sacrifice a little pleasure at first to the expectance of greater. The study of a few years will make the rest of life completely easy. He who has begun his fortune by study, will certainly confirm it by perseverance. The love of books damps the passion for pleasure, and when this passion is once extinguished, life is then cheaply supported; thus a man being possessed of more than he wants, can never be subject to great disappointments, and avoids all those meannesses which indigence sometimes unavoidably produces. There is unspeakable pleasure attending the life of a voluntary student. The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one. We ought to lay hold of every incident in life for improvement, the trifling as well as the important. It is not one diamond alone which gives lustre to another, a common coarse stone is also employed for that purpose. Thus I ought to draw advantage from the insults and contempt I meet with from a worthless fellow. His brutality ought to induce me to self-examination, and correct every blemish that may have given rise to his calumny. Yet with all the pleasures and profits which are generally produced by learning, parents often find it difficult to induce their children to study. They often seem dragged to what wears the appearance of application. Thus being dilatory in the beginning, all future hopes of eminence are entirely cut off. If they find themselves obliged to write two lines more polite than ordinary, their pencil then seems as heavy as a mill-stone, and they spend ten years in turning two or three periods with propriety. But it is of no importance to read much, except you be regular in reading. If it be interrupted for any considerable time, it can never be attended with proper improvement. There are some who study for one day with intense application, and repose themselves for ten days after. But wisdom is a coquette, and must be courted with unabating assiduity. It was a saying of the ancients, that a man never opens a book without reaping some advantage by it. I say with them, that every book can serve to make us more expert, except romances, and these are no better than the instruments of debauchery. They are dangerous fictions, where love is the ruling passion. Avoid such performances where vice assumes the face of virtue; seek wisdom and knowledge without ever thinking you have found them. A man is wise, while he continues in the pursuit of wisdom; but when he once fancies that he has found the object of his inquiry, he then becomes a fool. Learn to pursue virtue, from the man that is blind, who never makes a step without first examining the ground with his staff. The world is like a vast sea, mankind like a vessel sailing on its tempestuous bosom. Our prudence is its sails, the sciences serve us for oars, good or bad fortune are the favourable or contrary winds, and judgment is the rudder; without this last the vessel is tossed by every billow, and will find shipwreck in every breeze. In a word, obscurity and indigence are the parents of vigilance and economy; vigilance and economy of riches and honour; riches and honour of pride and luxury; pride and luxury of impurity and idleness; and impurity and idleness again produce indigence and obscurity. Such are the revolutions of life. COMPOSITION.-Write the counsels here given, briefly, in your own words. COUNSEL TO YOUTH.-John Ruskin. See page 102. Ir is to be remembered that the giving of prizes can only be justified on the ground of their being the reward of superior diligence and more obedient attention to the directions of the teacher. They must never be supposed, because practically they never can become, indications of superior genius; unless in so far as genius is likely to be diligent and obedient, beyond the strength and temper of the dull. But, without any reference to the opinions of others, and without any chance of partiality in your own, there is one test by which you can all determine the rate of your real progress. Examine, after every period of renewed industry, how far you have enlarged your faculty of admiration. Consider how much more you can see to reverence, in the work of masters; and how much more to love, in the work of Nature. This is the only constant and infallible test of progress:-that you wonder more at the work of great men, and that you care more for natural objects. You have often been told by your teachers to expect this last result; but I fear that the tendency of modern thought is to reject the idea of that essential difference in rank between one intellect and another, of which increasing reverence is the wise acknowledgment. You may, at least in earlier years, test accurately your power of doing anything in the least rightly, by your increasing conviction that you never will be able to do it as well as it has been done by others. That is a lesson, I repeat, which differs much, I fear, from the one you are commonly taught. The vulgar and incomparably false saying of Macaulay's, that the intellectual giants of one age become the intellectual pigmies of the next, has been the text of too many sermons lately preached to you. You think you are going to do better things -each of you than Titian and Phidias; write better than Virgil; think more wisely than Solomon. My good young people, this is the foolishest, quite pre-eminently-perhaps almost the harmfullest-notion that could possibly be put into your empty little eggshells of heads. There is not one in a million of you that can ever be great in anything. To be greater than the greatest that have been is permitted, perhaps to no man in Europe in the course of two or three centuries. But because you cannot be Handel and Mozart, is it any reason why you should not learn to sing "God save the Queen' properly, when you have a mind to? Because a girl cannot be prima donna in the Italian Opera, is it any reason why she should not learn to play a jig for her brothers and sisters in good time, or a soft little tune for her tired mother, or that she should not sing to please herself, among the dew, on a May morning? Believe me, joy, humility, and usefulness always go together; as insolence with misery, and these both with destructiveness. You may learn with proud teachers how to throw down the Vendome Column, and burn the Louvre, but never how to lay so much as one touch of safe colour, or one layer of steady stones: and if, indeed, there be among you a youth of true genius, be assured that he will distinguish himself first, not by petulance or by disdain, but by discerning firmly what to admire and whom to obey. It will, I hope, be the result of the interest lately awakened in Art through our Provinces, to enable each town of importance to obtain, in permanent possession, a few-and it is desirable there should be no more than a few-examples of consummate and masterful art, an engraving or two by Dürer, a single portrait by Reynolds, a fifteenth century Florentine drawing, a thirteenth century French piece of painted glass, and the like; and that, in every town occupied in a given manufacture, examples of unquestionable excellence in that manufacture should be made easily accessible in its civic museum. NOTES.-Macaulay. See p. 23. Titian. -A great Italian painter. Born in the Venetian States, in 1477; died at Venice, 1576, at the age of 99. Phidias. A great Greek sculptor; died about B.C. 432. Virgil. The finest of the Roman poets. Born near Mantua, B.C. 70; died, B.C. 19. Handel. A great musical composer. Best known by his wonderful oratorio, "The Messiah." Born in Saxony, 1684; died in London, 1759. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Mozart.-A great musical genius. Born, 1756; died, 1792, at Vienna. The Vendome Column.A triumphal bronze column, erected in Paris by the First Napoleon, whose victories were represented on it, as Trajan's were on his column at Rome. The bronze used for these reliefs was made from cannon taken in Napoleon's battles. The statue of Napoleon surmounted the column. Dur ing the Insurrection of the Commune in 1871 the column was pulled down, but it is now being restored. It was 133 feet high and 12 feet in diameter. The Louvre. A palace in Paris, in which the great national collections of paintings, &c., were preserved. It was burned during the Communist Insurrection. Durer, Albert.-An eminent artist, and the first engraver on wood. Born at Nuremberg, 1471, and died there, 1528. Reynolds, Sir Joshua.-A great English artist. Born at Plympton, Devonshire, 1723: died, 1792. Buried in St. Paul's. Florentine drawing. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, and Michael Angelo Buonarotti, 14741564, are the great representatives of this school. Painted glass.-Glass-painting was known to the ancient Egyptians. It was revived about the tenth century. Specimens of the thirteenth century exist in England. OTHELLO'S ACCOUNT OF HIS COURTSHIP OF Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech, Their dearest action in the tented field; And little of this great world can I speak, |