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us-laughs the kindest laugh-points our neighbour's foible or eccentricity out to us with the most goodnatured, smiling confidence; and then, turning over his shoulder, whispers our foibles to our neighbour. What would Sir Roger de Coverly be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks? If the good knight did not call out to the people sleeping in church, and say "Amen" with such a delightful pomposity: if he did not make a speech in the assizecourt apropos de bottes, and merely to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator: if he did not mistake Madam Doll Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden: if he were wiser than he is: if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were but a mere English gentleman and game-preserver-of what worth were he to us? We love him for his vanities as much as his virtues. What is ridiculous is delightful in him: we are so fond of him because we laugh at him so. And out of that laughter, and out of that sweet weakness, and out of those harmless eccentricities and follies and out of that touched brain, and out of that honest manhood and simplicity—we get a result of happiness, goodness, tenderness, pity, piety; such as, if my audience will think their reading and hearing over, doctors and divines but seldom have the fortune to inspire. And why not? Is the glory of Heaven to be sung only by gentlemen in black coats? Must the truth be only expounded in gown and surplice, and out of those two vestments can nobody preach it? Commend me to this dear preacher without orders-this parson in the tye-wig. When this man looks from the world, whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the Heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted up with a more serene rapture: a human intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph Addison's. When he turns to Heaven, a Sabbath comes over that man's mind; and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and prayer. His sense of religion stirs through his whole being. In the fields, in the town: looking at the birds

in the trees: at the children in the streets: in the morning or in the moonlight: over his books in his own room: in a happy party at a country merry-making or a town assembly, good-will and peace to God's creatures, and love and awe of Him who made them, fill his pure heart and shine from his kind face. I think Addison's life was one of the most enviable. life prosperous and beautiful-a calm death-an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

Thackeray.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY ASSASSINS.

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The small number of those who perpetrated these murders in the French capital under the eyes of the legislature, is one of the most instructive facts in the history of revolutions. Marat had long before said, that with 200 assassins at a louis a day, he would govern France, and cause 300,000 heads to fall; and the events of the 2d September seemed to justify the opinion. The number of those actually engaged in the massacres did not exceed 300; and twice as many more witnessed and encouraged their proceedings; yet this handful of men governed Paris and France, with a despotism which three hundred thousand armed warriors afterwards strove in vain to effect. The immense majority of the well-disposed citizens, divided in opinion, irresolute in conduct, and dispersed in different quarters, were incapable of arresting a band of assassins, engaged in the most atrocious cruelties of which modern Europe has yet afforded an example-an important warning to the strenuous and the good in every succeeding age, to combine for defence the moment that the aspiring and the desperate have begun to agitate the public mind, and never to trust that mere smallness of numbers can be relied on for preventing reckless. ambition from destroying irresolute virtue. It is not less worthy of observation, that these atrocious massacres took place in the heart of a city where above

50,000 men were enrolled in the National Guard, and had arms in their hands; a force specifically destined to prevent insurrectionary movements, and support, under all changes, the majesty of the law. They were so divided in opinion, and the revolutionists composed so large a part of their number, that nothing whatever was done by them, either on the 10th August, when the king was dethroned, or the 2d September, when the prisoners were massacred. This puts in a forcible point of view the weakness of such a force, which, being composed of citizens, is distracted by their feelings, and actuated by their passions. In ordinary times, it may exhibit an imposing array, and be adequate to the repression of the smaller disorders; but it is paralysed by the events which throw society into convulsions, and generally fails at the decisive moment when its aid is most required.

THE QUACK PHILOSOPHER DISCOMFITED.

Alison.

For some time my elder brother turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read lectures to us every night from some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Pooh!" he said; "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see me standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for half an hour together, meditating profoundly!" My sister Mary remarked that we should all be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two.' Being an excellent skater he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But this he found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of Paris; but the case

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would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was not, he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming-top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the rotary motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis, perhaps he might even dream upon it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, "if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose doubt in fact had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes.

The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work; a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming-top that was required but a peg-top. Now this, in order to keep up the whirl at full stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly." But that was precisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate; to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs, was a thing he could not bring his mind to face.

However, as some compensation to us, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as everybody must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilised society. As he had made many a fire-balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by parachutes, it was not very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again, which, however, was a far different thing, he refused, under such poor encouragements, to try his winged parachutes

any more, either "aloft or below:" in the meantime, he resumed his general lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's.

He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the

presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother, she arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures for ever. He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the half circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities." Upon which a voice, a female voice, but whose voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish, retorted, "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin;" and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed: "Dark as night;" then came my younger brother's insurrectionary yell: "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in melodiously: "Dark as pitch." And the peal so continued to come round like a catch, that it was perfectly impossible to make head against it; whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round robin," it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as to the ringleader. Burke's epithet of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in everybody's mouth; and accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows, that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, muttering not very complimentary phrases.

We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother himself condescended at last to join us; but

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