plies the copies of its thoughts, wit prints, and its wisdom flies through the world on a myriad of wings at once; labor grinds wearily at the hand-mill, wit catches the vagrant winds, binds up the strength of the lazily flowing stream, and makes them work its will; labor has no legs but its own, wit appropriates the speed of the horse, or flies unwearily on the wings of the wind; labor sits spinning at its solitary wheel, and slowly produces its fruits, while wit sets a thousand wheels at work at once, and the fable of Briareus ceases to be a romance; labor is a man's humiliation, that brings him and binds him down to the earth, sensualizing his mind, and making him feel as though the very end of his being were but mere existence; labor asks no questions, has no doubts, no thoughts, no aspirations, no intellectual ambition; it sees nothing in nature but night and day, darkness and light-the night to sleep in and the day to work in; and so it moves its melancholy, monotonous round, till it sinks to the dust and sleeps in a forgotten grave. But by wit man lives to all that is around him, above him, or beneath him. It is the ubiquity of the mind that converses at once with the course of the planets and the customs of the antipodes. It is ever busy in seeking to solve the great riddle of being. It is the living principle of life, and is that whereby a man feels that he is. It is the exercise that strengthens but wearies not. It is the activity of intellect that finds as much pleasure in the arising of new doubts as in the solution of its old ones. It is the muscle and nerve of the soul, that longs for difficulties to wrestle with, and has an appetite for mental conflict. Labor, if it thinks at all, thinks only of and for itself; wit, though it thinks for itself, thinks of others; it makes universal acquaintance with universal nature, it reads human thoughts, and sympathizes with human interests. Labor is selfish even in its generosity; wit is generous in its selfish

ness.

To conclude, you may sometimes show that you have not got your own wits about you, by thinking that other people have. When Mrs. M'Gibbon was preparing to act Jane Shore,→ at Liverpool, her dresser, an ignorant country girl, informed her that a woman had called to request two box orders,

because she and her daughter had walked four miles on purpose to see the play. "Does she know me?" inquired the mistress. "Not at all," was the reply. "What a very odd request!" exclaimed Mrs. M'G.-"Has the good woman got her faculties about her?"—"I think she have, ma'am, for I see she ha' got summut tied up in a red silk handkercher."

WOMAN-An exquisite production of nature, between a rose and an angel, according to a German poet; the female of the human species, according to the zoologists; the redeeming portion of humanity, according to politer fact and experience. Woman is a treasure of which the profligate and the unmarried can never appreciate the full value, for he who possesses many does not possess one. Malherbe says in his Letters, that the Creator may have repented the creation of man, but that he had no reason to repent having made woman. Who will deny this; and which of us does not feel, though in due subjection to a holier religion, the devotion of Anacreon, who, when he was asked, why he addressed so many of his hymns to women, and so few to the deities, answered, "Because women are my deities?"

In England the upper classes are generally so much occupied with public affairs, or with local and magisterial duties, to say nothing of the uncongenial sports of the field, that women are obliged to associate with frivolous danglers and idlers, to whose standard they necessarily lower their minds and their conversation. To appear a blue-stocking, subjects a female to certain ridicule with those coxcombs who adopt the silly notion of Lessing, "that a young lady who thinks, is like a man who rouges," and who maintain that she should address herself, not to the sense, but to the senses of her male companions. Politics have thus tended to effect a mental dissociation of the sexes, the jealousy of dunces to trivialize the conversational intercourse that still subsists, and women, whose unchecked intellectual energies would be "Dolphin-like, and show themselves above the element they move in," are compelled to bow to this subjection, unless they have the courage to set up for bluestockings-and old maids. Were their supremacy to effect no

change in the present general character of the sex, I believe the world would be an incalculable gainer by making them lords of their lords, and committing to them the sole direction of all affairs, both national and domestic. As some of our most distinguished sovereigns have been females, is it unreasonable to conclude that we should ensure permanent good government for the whole human race, by acknowledging the sovereignty of the sex?

To the French must be assigned the honor of the following just encomium, "Sans les femmes les deux extrémités de la vie seraient sans secours, et le milieu sans plaisirs.”

WORDS-Sometimes signs of ideas, and sometimes of the want of them. When so many are coining new words, it is a security against a superfluous supply to know that old ones are occasionally lost. An Eton scholar, whose faculties had been bemuddled with the spondees and dactyls of prosody, having got out of nominal into real nonsense verses, carried up a soi-disant Latin epigram to his master. After reading it over two or three times very carefully, the pedagogue exclaimed, "I cannot find any verb here." "That is the reason that I brought it to you," said the boy with great naïveté; “I thought you might perhaps tell me where it was."

WORLD-THE-A great inn, kept in a perpetual bustle by arrivals and departures: by the going away of those who have just paid their bills, (the debt of nature,) and the coming of those who soon have a similar account to settle:-Decessio pereuntium, et successio periturorum.

WRITING-Painting invisible words-giving substance and color to immaterial thought, enabling the dumb to talk to the deaf.

WRONG-may be aggravated without any increase of evil doing, as good may be diminished without any abatement of actual beneficence. "Joyful remembrances of wrong actions," says Jean Paul, are their half repetitions, as repentant remem

brances of good ones are their half abolishment. In law, the intention, not the act, constitutes the crime; and in the moral law, virtue should be measured by the same standard.

YAWNING-Opening the mouth when you are sleepy, and want to shut your eyes; an infectious sensation very prevalent during the delivery of a tedious sermon, or the perusal of a dull novel, but never experienced when reading a work like the present!

YEARS of discretion. The young and giddy reader is requested to see-Greek Calends.

YOUTH-A magic lantern, that surrounds us with illusions which excite pleasure, surprise, and admiration, whatever be their nature. The old age of the sensual and the vicious is the same lantern without its magic-the glasses broken, and the illusions gone, while the exhausted lamp, threatening every moment to expire, sheds a ghastly glare, not upon a fair tablecloth, full of jocund associations, but upon what appears to he a dismal shroud, prepared to receive our remains.

And now, gentle reader, or rather may I call you simple, if you have waded through this strange farago, here will I bring it to a close, hoping by its example the better to impress upon you the pithy precept, that all our follies and frivolities, all our crude and undigested notions, all our "bald and disjointed talk," should, like this little volume, terminate with -YOUTH.

THE END.

Handsomely illustrated, and bound either in paper covers, or in muslin. Price, in Paper, $1.50; in Cloth, $2.00.

** In this series of Romances are included the famous novels of LOUISA MUHLBACH. Since the time when Sir Walter Scott produced so profound a sensation in the reading-world, no historical novels have achieved a success so great as those from the pen of Miss MUHLBACH.

1. TOO STRANGE NOT TO BE TRUE. A Novel. Lady Georgiana Fullerton.

By

2. THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY. By Miss Yonge, author of "The Heir of Redclyffe," "Heartsease," etc.

3. JOSEPH II. AND HIS COURT. By Louisa Muhlbach. 4. FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS COURT. By Louisa Muhlbach.

5. BERLIN AND SANS-SOUCI; or, FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FRIENDS. By Louisa Muhlbach.

6. THE MERCHANT OF BERLIN. By Louisa Muhlbach. 7. FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FAMILY. By Louisa Muhlbach.

8. HENRY VIII. AND CATHARINE PARR. By Louisa Muhlbach.

9. LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES. By Louisa Muhlbach.

20. MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER SON. By Louisa

Muhlbach.