For the sake of showing you how some shabby book was injured, they would disfigure the finest.

"Never lend your books," said a demonstrator, warningly, one day, "to that Hipsonberry; at every place where he leaves off he turns down the page, in this fashion!"

And here, of course, a volume was snatched up for illustration, to show practically how a leaf is turned down by an unconscionable reader.

These suit-the-action-to-the-word people have another favourite trick. They denounce some esculent as not simply disagreeable to the palate, but so surpassingly nauseous as to be sickening; this duly expatiated on, they wind up with, "Only taste it!" They discover some other substance, obnoxious in as curious a degree to the olfactory nerves, and they are sure to crown their peroration upon its offensiveness, with "Just smell it now!"

They are the only eccentrics upon earth who are desperately offended when you are willing to take their words for a fact. Their simple affirmation in either of these cases is all-sufficient; but they as good as tell you that there is no trust to be put in them, and that their opinions are worth nothing. These practical, proofloving men are truly modest creatures.

Some of them, rather than allow a mere description to take the place of a demonstration, will go so far as to practise upon themselves, to their own detriment, when the more convenient machinery of a bystander is not to be had. If they state some fact from which they are suffering, they give you an example of the fact and of the suffering too. They act a painful scene all over again, just as Launce does by the aid of his dog and his shoe.

When a fly has found its way into their eyelid, and

they tell you how acute the agony is upon opening the eye, they open the eye immediately to convince you of their accuracy.

We can all recollect what Abernethy is reported to have said to the simple lady, who consulted him about her inward bruise, and explained that when she raised her left arm ("suiting the action to the word") it put her to extreme torture.

"Then what a confounded fool you must be to do it," was the muttered reflection of the sensible man.

Shakspeare, who missed nothing, must have seen some of these practical people, and has turned his observation to the usual excellent account. Othello, instructing his hearers as to what they are bound to report of him in Venice, proceeds,

"Say, too, that in Aleppo once,

When a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him-thus!"

The stage direction adds, "Othello stabs himself." This is undoubtedly carrying the principle of practical exposition to its farthest possible limit.

When Shakspeare does a thing he does it thoroughly; and we have almost wished, when obligingly invited to swallow something nauseous by way of testing its disagreeableness, that the matter as well as the manner of the Moor were adopted by the demonstrators. When they relate a story of shooting or poisoning, they should illustrate with pistol or prussic acid, and die dramatically, martyrs to the truth of illustrated narrative.

Short of that extent, which may be thought to go a little too far, there is, it must be confessed, high authority for the practice without resorting to fable.

When the illustrious Burke declared in the House of

Commons, that rather than witness the direful calamity (in deprecation of which he had delivered an impassioned and masterly address), he would plunge a dagger in his heart; at the same time drawing one from under his waistcoat, and exhibiting it to the fear-surprised eyes of honourable gentlemen; he hit upon a magnificent specimen of the practical and the demonstrative. His friend, the all-admired Fox, figures more pleasantly and wittily in an equally well-known story, the tendency of which is similar. When interrupted, in an allusion to a gentleman whose name will immediately transpire, by loud cries of "Name, name!"

"No," he said, "I must decline mentioning him, though to do it is as easy as to say Jack Robinson."

But both these examples we must consider to be eclipsed by the admirable faculty for practical illustration once strikingly displayed, very strikingly as will be seen, by an eminent pamphleteer now dead, who in his younger days was usher in an humble school. Expounding to a publisher (who had called during school-hours to settle terms for a new treatise on finance) the merits of a grand plan for paying off the national debt without sponge or money: "Sir," said he, "I here prove by simple arithmetic, that there is no more difficulty in paying it off at once, than there is in caning this boy!” at the same instant, dragging one from the nearest form and caning him vigorously; but observe, without the least difficulty.

The illustration was triumphant. The mode of argument was more than forcible, it was convincing. By merely comparing the two tasks of liquidating the debt and flagellating the boy, he just raised an idea of their identity in point of ease; the consequence was, that he seemed to establish the practicability of the one by immediately performing the other. When the

admiring publisher saw the boy flogged, he fancied the debt was paid. It was the cane that did it all; the comparison would have been nothing without the successful practical experiment.

Desirous of dealing fairly by the demonstrators, as by us they have not done, this anecdote is cited because it seems to supply some vindication of their practice. We are not, and possibly nobody is in these times, so absurd as to object to the flogging of a boy merely because he is not our own, and has committed no offence. The question is, not whether the little ceremony with the cane is just, but whether it is expedient; whether the injury done to the weaker party is a convenience to the stronger. In the case referred to, it was; and the demonstrative principle succeeded. We complain of it only where it fails; where an unwarrantable attack is made without beneficial results; where the outrage is wholly superfluous. It is thrown away, when an acquaintance jams one's hat down over one's eyes, for the mere sake of showing how his own had just before been served in the mob; but it would be by no means thrown away, perhaps, if, while seated beside an author seeing his new play, you were to hiss loudly, with the view of exemplifying to the dramatist the energy with which some brute in the pit had been hissing in his absence.

Nay, you may even go all lengths with the demonstrators, provided you keep a desired object distinctly in view; you may not only injure another, but yourself also, when a great moral end is to be answered.

A story occurs, as a case in point, of a needy gambler, who wished to palm himself off as a pigeon upon a famous rook whom he had never before met, or at least to beget a conviction that he could pay what he lost; which otherwise might seem doubtful.

"Why, sir," said he, “I value it (whatever they were

conversing about) I value it no more than I do this bank-note;" taking out one of the last two tens he had left in the world, and quietly lighting his cigar with it.

How empty would have been this vaunt without the flame! The sacrifice was essential to success. Success! by which, in every age and in every class of life, so much that is doubtful in policy and worse than doubtful in morals, is triumphantly vindicated.

The chapter of complaints directed against those who do suit the action to the word is after all a short one; but what a volume would it have been, had it included commentaries upon those who do not suit the action to the word.

Hazlitt wrote a brilliant essay some years ago, upon "Persons one would wish to have seen."

Very well," said Charles Lamb, upon reading it, "then I'll write a paper twice as long, on 'Persons one would wish not to have seen'.”

FEMALE ARITHMETICIANS.

FIGURES on China jars and ivory fans, figures in intricate quadrilles, and figures of polite rhetoric, are among the things which education and custom have rendered perfectly comprehensible to every woman of taste; but figures of arithmetic are unquestionably matters on which even the most enlightened and accomplished of the sex are apt to entertain rather confused ideas.

We intend not hereby the remotest of remote allusions to the subject of age. On that point, it is well known their notions are for the most part perfectly clear-per