the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the 'finny tribe.' He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by LawrenceBoythorn-like tirades against that institution; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny himself the pleasure of reading Borrow, whose one dominating passion was camaraderie, and who hob-a-nobbed in the friendliest spirit with priest and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description by any pen other than his own. Hail to thee, George Borrow! Cervantes himself, Gil Blas, do not more effectually carry their readers into the land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by favour of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion (which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody a peseta, and at no risk whatever to our necks-be they long or short.

Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: tooth

We have

some dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books- these are our demands. nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases — the warrior place his men as he likes the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good? when the battle has been fought, Who won ? when the book comes out, Does it read?

Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty to write agreeably some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other man's book.

Literature exists to please, to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and

their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures—and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe. Hear him in The Frank Courtship:

""I must be loved;" said Sybil; "I must see
The man in terrors, who aspires to me :
At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,

What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:
Nay, such the rapture that my smiles inspire
That reason's self must for a time retire."

"Alas! for good Josiah," said the dame,

"These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame ; He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!

He cannot, child: "- the child replied, "He must.'

Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society's service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.

But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name be brought upon the reader's quivering lip?

To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's.

WORN-OUT TYPES.

It is now a complaint of quite respectable antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humourloving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief - it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us.

A cheerfully disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told,