casionally knock down the barrister. Show me the conscientious counsellor, who, refusing to hire out his talents that he may screen the guilty, overreach the innocent, defraud the orphan, or impoverish the widow, will scrupulously decline a brief, unless the cause of his client wear at least a semblance of honesty and justice-who will leave knaves and robbers to the merited inflictions of the law, while he will cheerfully exert his eloquence and skill in redressing the wrongs of the injured. Show me such a Phoenix of a barrister, and I will admit that he richly deserves-not to have been at the bar!

"Does not a barrister's affected warmth and habitual dissimulation impair his honesty?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Is there not some danger that he may put on the same mask in common life, in the intercourse with his friends? "" Why no, sir,” replied the Doctor. "A man will no more carry the artifice of the bar into the common intercourse of society, than a man who is paid for tumbling upon his hands will continue to do so when he should walk on his feet.” Perhaps not; but how are we to respect the forensic tumbler, who will walk upon his hands, and perform the most ignoble antics for a paltry fee?

All briefless barristers will please to consider themselves excepted from the previous censure, for I should be really sorry to speak ill of any man without a cause.

The waxen

BATHOS-sinking when you mean to rise. wings of Icarus, which instead of making him master of the air, plunged him into the water, were a practical bathos. So was the miserable imitation of the Thunderer by Salmoneus, which, instead of giving him a place among the Gods, consigned him to the regions below.

Of the written bathos, an amusing instance is afforded in the published tour of a lady, who has attained some celebrity in literature. Describing a storm to which she was exposed, when crossing in the steamboat from Dover to Calais, her ladyship says, "In spite of the most earnest solicitations to the contrary, in which the captain cagerly joined, I firmly persisted in remaining upon deck, although the tempest had

now increased to such a frightful hurricane, that it was not without great difficulty I could—hold up my parasol!

As a worthy companion to this little morceau, we copy the following affecting advertisement from a London newspaper: "If this should meet the eye of Emma D——, who absented herself last Wednesday from her father's house, she is implored to return, when she will be received with undiminished affection by her almost heart-broken parents. If nothing can persuade her to listen to their joint appeal— should she be determined to bring their gray hairs with sorrow to the grave-should she never mean to revisit a home where she has passed so many happy years—it is at least expected, if she be not totally lost to all sense of propriety, that she will, without a moment's further delay,-send back the key of the tea-caddy."

Sydney Smith cites a French traveller who was much given to the vice of declaiming upon common-place subjects :"He goes on, mingling bucolic details and sentimental effusions, melting and measuring, crying and calculating, in a manner which is very bad, if it is poetry, and worse if it is prose. In speaking of the modes of cultivating potatoes, he cannot avoid calling the potato a modest vegetable: and when he comes to the exportation of horses from the duchy of Holstein, we learn that 'these animals are dragged from the bosom of their peaceable and modest country, to hear, in foreign regions, the sound of the warlike trumpet; to carry the combatant amid the hostile ranks; to increase the éclat of some pompous procession; or drag, in gilded car, some favorite of fortune.'"

How different from this is that truly pathetic passage in Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh's Journal of Travel from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, when taking leave of the steamer he feelingly describes his affection for his fellow-voyagers, from the captain and purser, "down even to the greasy old cook, who with a touching affection used to bring us locks of his hair in the soup."

BEAUTY-has been not unaptly, though somewhat vul

garly, defined by T. H. as "all my eye," since it addresses itself solely to that organ, and is intrinsically of little value. From this ephemeral flower are distilled many of the ingredients in matrimonial unhappiness. It must be a dangerous gift, both for its possessor and its admirer, if there be any truth in the assertion of M. Gombaud, that beauty “représente les Dieux, et les fait oublier." If its possession, as is too often the case, turns the head, while its loss sours the temper; if the long regret of its decay outweighs the fleeting pleasure of its bloom, the plain should rather pity than envy the handsome. Beauty of countenance, which, being the light of the soul shining through the face, is independent of feature or complexion, is the most attractive, as well as the most enduring charm. Nothing but talent and amiability can bestow it, no statue or picture can rival, time itself cannot destroy it.

Wants are seldom blessings, and yet the want of a common standard of beauty has incalculably widened the sphere of our enjoyment, since all tastes may thus be gratified by the infinite variety of minds, and the endless diversities in the human form. Father Buffier maintains that the beauty of every object consists in that form and color most usual among things of that particular sort to which it belongs. He seems to have thought that there was no inherent beauty in any thing except the juste milieu, the happy mean. "The beauty

of a nose," says Adam Smith, following out the same idea in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, "is the form at which Nature seems to have aimed in all noses, which she seldom hits exactly, but to which all her deviations still bear a strong resemblance. Many copies of an original may all miss it in some respects, yet they will all resemble it more than they resemble one another. So it is with animated forms; and thus beauty, though, in one sense, exceedingly rare, because few attain the happy mean, is, at the same time, a common quality, because all the deviations have a greater resemblance to this standard than to one another."

Even this, however, is not a certain criterion, for our estimate of beauty, depending mainly upon association, will be influenced by the predominant feeling in the mind of the spec

tator, whether he be contemplating a woman or a landscape. Brindley, the civil engineer, considered a straight canal a much more picturesque and pleasing object than a meandering river. For what purpose,' ," he was asked, "do you apprehend rivers to have been intended?"-"To feed navigable canals," was the reply. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was no beauty without utility, but he was not provided with a rejoinder when the peacock's tail was objected to him. What so beautiful as flowers, and yet we cannot always perceive their utility in the economy of nature. There are belles to whom the same remark may be applied.

As the want of exterior generally increases the interior beauty, we should do well to judge of women as of the impressions on medals, and pronounce those the most valuable which are the plainest.

BEER-SMALL-An undrinkable drink, which if it were set upon a cullender to let the water run out, would leave a residuum of- -nothing. Of whatever else it may be guilty, it is generally innocent of malt and hops. Upon the principle of lucus a non lucendo, it may be termed liquid bread, and the strength of corn. Small-beer comes into the third category of the honest brewer, who divided his infusions into three classes-strong table, common table, and lamen-table. An illiterate vendor of this commodity wrote over his door at Harrowgate, "Bear sold here! "He spells the word quite correctly," said T. H., "if he means to apprise us that the article is his own Bruin!"

แ

"What will be the best method of saving this small-beer from depredation?" said a lady to her butler.—" Placing a cask of strong beer at the side of it," was the reply.

Aris

BENEFICENCE-may exist without benevolence. ing from a sense of duty, not from sympathy or compassion, it may be a charity of the hand rather than of the heart. And this, though less amiable, is, perhaps, more certain than the charity of impulse, inasmuch as a principle is better to be depended upon than a feeling. There is an apparent benefi

cence which has no connection either with right principle or right feeling, as, when we throw alms to a beggar, not to relieve him of his distress, but ourselves of his importunity or of the pain of beholding him; and there is a charity which is mere selfishness, as when we bestow it for the sole purpose of ostentation. We need not be surprised that certain names should be so pertinaciously blazoned before the public eye in lists of contributors, if we bear in mind that "charity covereth a multitude of sins."

"BENEVOLENCE"-said S. S., in a charity sermon-"is a sentiment common to human nature. A never sees B in distress without wishing C to relieve him.”

BENTLEY-DOCTOR.-In the lately published life of this literary Thraso, the editor has omitted to insert an anecdote which is worth preserving, if it were only for the pun that it embalms. Robert Boyle, afterwards Earl of Cork, having, as it was generally thought, defeated Bentley in a controversy concerning the authenticity of the letters of Phalaris, the Doctor's pupils drew a caricature of their master, whom the guards of Phalaris were thrusting into his brazen bull, for the purpose of burning him alive, while a label issued from his mouth with the following inscription: "Well, well! I had rather be roasted than Boyled."

BIGOT-Camden relates that when Rollo, Duke of Normandy, received Gisla, the daughter of Charles the Foolish, in marriage, he would not submit to kiss Charles's foot; and when his friends urged him by all means to comply with that ceremony, he made answer in the English tongue-NE SE BY GOD-i. e. Not so by God. Upon which the king and his courtiers deriding him, and corruptly repeating his answer, called him bigot, which was the origin of the term. Though modern bigots resemble their founder in being wedded to the offspring of a foolish parent, viz., their own opinion, they are unlike him in every other particular; for they not only insist upon kissing the foot of some superior authority, the Pope of