TRAITURE.

Evremond

Artists are fond of painting their own SELF-Por portraits. In Florence there is a gallery of hundreds of them, including the most illustrious, in all of which there are, as Hawthorne remarks, autobiographical characteristics, so to speak; traits, expressions, loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible had they not been painted from within. Yet their reality and truth are none the less. There is no more remarkable bit of self-portraiture than that by Saint Évremond: "He is a philosopher Saint who keeps aloof alike from superstition and from impiety; an epicurean, whose distaste for debauchery is as strong as his appetite for pleasure; a man who has never known want, but at the same time has never enjoyed affluence. He lives in a manner which is despised by those who have everything, envied by those who have nothing, appreciated by those who make their happiness and their reason agree. his youth he hated waste, being persuaded that property was necessary to make a long life comfortable. In his age he cares not for economy, feeling that want is little. to be feared when one has but a little time to want in. He is grateful for the gifts of nature, and finds no fault with those of

In Happiness

and reason

Life too short to read

all sorts of

books.

THE PHI-
LOSOPHER'S
STONE.

fortune; he hates crime, endures error,
and pities misfortune. He does not try to
find out the bad points of men in order to
decry them, but he looks for their foibles
in order to give himself amusement; is
secretly rejoiced at the knowledge of these
foibles, and would be still more pleased to
make them known to others, did not his
discretion forbid. Life is to his mind too
short to read all sorts of books, and to load
one's memory with all sorts of things at
the risk of one's judgment. He devotes
himself not to the most learned writings,
so as to acquire knowledge, but to the most
sensible, so as to strengthen his under-
standing. At one time he seeks the most
elegant to refine his taste, at another the
most amusing to refresh his spirits.
for friendship, he has more constancy than
might be expected from a philosopher, and
more heartiness than could be looked for
even in a younger and less experienced
man. As for religion, he thinks justice,
charity, and trust in the goodness of God
of more importance than sorrow for past
offenses."

As

Douglas Jerrold expresses the opinion. that the true philosopher's stone is only

omnipotence.

intense impudence. Perhaps, - we should say, but with a generous tempering of self-possession and readiness. So qualified and fortified, to the common eye, it has the look of omnipotence. At the point of The look of sublimity it dazzles, and is superhuman to the multitude. Only intelligence can penetrate it, and know its true character. One night at the theatre of San Carlo, Naples, Dumas the elder found himself chatting familiarly with a stranger who, when the play was over, said to him patronizingly : "I have greatly enjoyed your conversation, sir, and hope to see more of you. If ever you visit Paris call on me, I am Alexandre Dumas." "The devil you are! So am I!" replied the novelist, with a burst of laughter. Such impudent audacity, with a due admixture of self-possession and facility, seldom fails of its purpose. "Behold

me now," says Rousseau, in his Confessions, Rousseau. "a teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music

and gave concerts at his house, I insisted
on giving him a specimen of my talent, and
I set to work to compose a piece for his
concert with as much effrontery as if I
knew all about it."
off duly, and the
ducted it with as

The performance came
strange impostor con-

much gravity as the

profoundest master. Never since the beginning of opera had the like charivari John Law. greeted the ears of men. A friend of John Law asked him one day, whether it was true that he was going to war with England. "I should think," added he, "that a minister like yourself, whose interest it is to make the State flourish by commerce, and by establishments that require peace, would never think of going to war." Law replied, with the utmost calmness, "I do not desire Frederic the war, but am not afraid of it." Frederic the Great once saw a crowd staring at something on a wall. He rode up, and found that the object of curiosity was a scurrilous placard against himself. The placard had been posted up so high that it was not easy to read it. Frederic ordered his attendants to take it down and put it lower. "My people and I," he said, “have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please,

Great.

and I am to do what I please." At the time of the Gordon riots, in June, 1780, Grimaldi resided in a front room on the Grimaldi. second floor in Holborn, on the same side of the way near to Red Lion Square, when the mob passing by the house, and Grimaldi being a foreigner, they thought he must be a Papist. On hearing he lived there, they all stopped, and there was a general shouting; a cry of "No Popery" was raised, and they were about to assail the house, when Grimaldi put his head out of the window from the second floor, and, making comical grimaces, called out, "Gentlemen, in dis house dare be no religion at all." Laughing at their mistake, the mob proceeded on, first giving him three huzzas, though his house, unlike all the others, had not written on the door, "No Popery." A marauder, arrested for a high- A marau way robbery, on being brought before a pitied. magistrate, asserted that he was more entitled to be pitied than to be punished. "Pitied!" exclaimed the justice, whilst his eyebrows arched with more than ordinary wonder and contempt; "and on what account, pray?" "Sure on account of my misfortune." "Your misfortune, indeed! What, that we have caught you, I sup

der to be