about your calibre: depend upon it, they will find you bore enough."

BREATH-air received into the lungs by many young men of fashion for the important purposes of smoking a cigar and whistling a tune.

BREVITY-the soul of wit, which accounts for the tenuity of the present work! Into how narrow a compass has Seneca compressed his account of the total destruction of Lyons by fire: "Inter magnam urbem et nullam nox una interfuit,"-between a great city and none, only a single night intervened!

BREVITY-the soul of wit. Brevity is in writing what charity is to all the other virtues. Righteousness is worth nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other. There is an event recorded in the Bible, which men who write books should keep constantly in their remembrance. It is there set forth, that many centuries ago, the earth was covered with a great flood, by which the whole of the human race, with the exception of one family, were destroyed. It appears also that from thence a great alteration was made in the longevity of mankind, who from a range of seven or eight hundred years, which they enjoyed before the flood, were confined to their present period of seventy or eighty years. This epoch in the history of man gave birth to the twofold division of the antediluvian and the postdiluvian style of writing, the latter of which naturally contracted itself into those inferior limits which were better accommodated to the abridged duration of human life and literary labor. Now, to forget this event,--to write without the fear of the deluge before his eyes, and to handle a subject as if mankind could lounge over a pamphlet for ten years, as before their submersion,-is to be guilty of the most grievous error into which a writer can possibly fall. An author should call in the aid of some brilliant pen, and cause the distressing scenes of the deluge to be portrayed in the most lively colors for his use. He should gaze at Noah

and be brief. The ark should constantly remind him of the little time there is left for reading;. and he should learn, as they did in the ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into a very little compass.

Upon the memorable dark day, 19th March, 1790, a lady wrote to the celebrated Dr. Byles, in Boston, as follows:"Dear Doctor, how do you account for this darkness?" Το which he replied, as wittily as briefly :-"Dear Madam, I am as much in the dark as you are."

BRIEF―the excuse of counsel for an impertinence that is often inexcusable.

BRUTES-Philosophers have been much puzzled about the essential characteristics of brutes, by which they may be distinguished from men. Some define a brute to be an animal that never laughs, or an animal incapable of laughter; some say they are mute animals. The Peripatetics allowed them a sensitive power, but denied them a rational one. The Platonists allowed them reason and understanding; though in a degree less pure and less refined than that of men. Lactantius allows them every thing which men have, except a sense of religion; and some sceptics have gone so far as to say they have this also. Descartes maintained that brutes are mere inanimate machines, absolutely destitute, not only of all reason, but of all thought and reflection; and that all their actions are only consequences of the exquisite mechanism of their bodies. This system, however, is much older than Descartes; it was borrowed by him from Gomez Pereira, a Spanish physician, who employed thirty years in composing a treatise on this subject, which he very affectionately called by the name of his father and mother-"Antoniana Margarita." Poor Gomez was so far from having opponents, that he had not even readers: his theory, in the hands of Descartes, excited a controversy which reached from one end of Europe to the other; many, who maintained the opposite hypothesis to Descartes, contended that brutes are endowed with a soul, essentially inferior to that of man; and to this soul some have im

piously allowed immortality. But the most curious of all opinions, respecting the understanding of beasts, is that advanced by Père Bougeant, a Jesuit, in a work entitled “Philosophical Amusement on the Language of Beasts." In this book he contends that each animal is inhabited by a separate and distinct devil; that not only this was the case with respect to cats, which have long been known to be very favorite residences of familiar spirits, but that a peculiar devil swam with every turbot, grazed with every ox, soared with every lark, dived with every duck, and was roasted with every chicken.

Sydney Smith, from whom I quote the above, says: "I should be very sorry to do injustice to the poor brutes, who have no professors to revenge their cause by lecturing on our faculties; and at the same time I know there is a very strong anthropical party, who view all eulogiums on the brute creation with a very considerable degree of suspicion; and look upon every compliment which is paid to the ape as high treason to the dignity of man. But I confess I feel myself so much at my ease about the superiority of mankind,-I have such a marked and decided contempt for the understanding of every baboon I have yet seen,-I feel so sure that the blue ape without a tail will never rival us in poetry, painting, and music, that I see no reason whatever, why justice may not be done to the few fragments of soul, and tatters of understanding, which they may really possess. I have sometimes, perhaps, felt a little uneasy at Exeter 'Change, from contrasting the monkeys with the 'prentice-boys who are teasing them; but a few pages of Locke, or a few lines of Milton, have always restored me to tranquillity, and convinced me that the superiority of man had nothing to fear."

BUFFOON-A professional fool, whereas a wag is an amateur fool.

BULL-A bull is exactly the counterpart of a witticism; for as wit discovers real relations that are not apparent, bulls admit apparent relations that are not real. The pleasure

arising from bulls proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar in which a resemblance might have been suspected. The same doctrine will apply to wit and bulls in action. Practical wit discovers connection or relation between actions, in which duller understandings discover none; and practical bulls originate from an apparent relation between two actions which more correct understandings immediately perceive to have none at all. In the late rebellion in Ireland, the rebels, who had conceived a high degree of indignation against some great banker, passed a resolution that they would burn his notes;-which they accordingly did, with great assiduity; forgetting, that in burning his notes they were destroying his debts, and that for every note which went into the flames, a correspondent value went into the banker's pocket. A gentleman, in speaking of a nobleman's wife, of great rank and fortune, lamented very much that she had no children. A medical gentleman who was present observed, that to have no children was a great misfortune, but he thought he had remarked it was hereditary in some families.

Louis XIV. being extremely harassed by the repeated solicitations of a veteran officer for promotion, said one day, loud enough to be heard, "that gentleman is the most troublesome officer I have in my service." "That is precisely the charge," said the old man, "which your Majesty's enemies bring against me."

An English gentleman was writing a letter in a coffeehouse, and perceiving that an Irishman stationed behind him was taking that liberty which Parmenio used with his friend Alexander, instead of putting his seal upon the lips of the curious impertinent, the English gentleman thought proper to reprove the Hibernian, if not with delicacy, at least with poetical justice. He concluded writing his letter in these words: "I would say more, but a damned tall Irishman is reading over my shoulder every word I write." "You lie, you scoundrel," said the self-convicted Hibernian.

A copious and amusing book might be made, by collecting the bulls and blunders of all nations, except the Irish, whom

we would exclude, upon the principle that determined Martial not to describe the nose of Tongilianus, because "nil præter nasum Tongilianus habet." Of the French bulls, there are few better than the following: A Gascon nobleman had been reproaching his son with ingratitude. "I owe you nothing," said the unfilial young man ; so far from having served me, you have always stood in my way; for if you had never been born, I should at this moment be the next heir of my rich grandfather."

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Worthy of a place by the side of this Gallic Hibernicism is the niaiserie of Captain Baudin, the commander of a French expedition of discovery. On opening a box of magnetic needles, they were found to be much rusted, which sensibly impaired their utility. "What else can you expect? claimed the irritated captain; "all the articles provided by government are shabby beyond description. Had they acted as I could have wished, they would have given us silver instead of steel needles."

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An Irishman may be described as a sort of Minotaur, half man and half bull. "Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem," as Ovid has it. He might run me into a longer essay than Miss Edgeworth's, without exhausting the subject; I shall therefore content myself with a single instance of his felicity in this figure of speech. In the examination of a Connaught lad, he was asked his age.-"I'm just twenty, your honor; but I would have been twenty-one, only my mother miscarried the year before I was born."

In a debate on the leather-tax, in 1794, in the Irish House of Commons, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir John Parnell) observed with great emphasis, "that in prosecution of the present war, every man ought to give his last guinea to protect the remainder." Mr. Vandeclure said, that "however that might be, the tax on leather would be severely felt by the barefooted peasantry of Ireland." To which Sir Boyle Roche replied, that "this could be very easily remedied, by making the under leather of wood."

Digby sat a long time very attentive, considering a canebottom chair. At length he said, "I wonder what fellow