Sterne's

worldly face of a man fond of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen, sarcastic, odd expression that we see in his only engraved portrait. The picture is an original, and must needs be very valuable; and we wish it might be prefixed to some new and worthier biography of a writer whose character the world has always treated with singular harshness, considering how much it was to him. There was likewise a crayon-portrait Portrait of of Sterne's wife, looking so haughty and wife. unamiable, that the wonder is, not that he ultimately left her, but that he ever contrived to live a week with such an awful woman. George Eliot, in Romola, delineates the face of a traitor. "A perfect traitor," she says, "should have a face which vice can write no marks on -lips that will lie with a dimpled smile - eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard." It is said that Lamb had a head Lamb's worthy of Aristotle, with as fine a heart as ever beat in a human bosom, and limbs very fragile to sustain it. There was a caricature of him sold in the shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Procter went into the shop in a passion, and asked the

head.

No true portrait of Lamb.

HEREDITY.

man what he meant by putting forth such a libel. The man apologized, and said that the artist meant no offense. There never was a true portrait of Lamb. In that wonderful picture of Leonardo, The Last Supper, it is fancied that the heads of the Apostles are from the men of his own time, but the face of the Lord, by a perfect study of chiaroscuro, radiates the light upon the groups, and claims the principal admiration of the beholder. There is a story that the artist, having finished the rest, could not paint this; he found it one morning miraculously finished.

The law of heredity is more and more being recognized, investigated, and regarded. The body, more and more, is being esteemed the tabernacle of a soul, and an added sacredness attached to it accordingly. "There is but one temple in the world," says Novalis, "and that temple is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hands on a human body." There is a song made in honor of Allan, the famous captain of Clanranald, who fell at Sherrif-muir.

His servant, who lay on the field watching his master's dead body, being asked next day, who that was, answered, "He was a man yesterday." The grandson of Ma- The grandhomet was slain with three and thirty Mahomet. strokes of lances and swords.

66

After they

son of

request.

had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the castle of Cufa, and the inhuman governor struck him on the mouth with a cane. Alas!" exclaimed an aged Mussulman, on these lips have I seen the lips of the apostle of God!" Johnson asked one of his executors, a few days before his death, "Where do you intend to bury me?" He answered, "In Westminster Abbey." "Then," continued Johnson, "if my friends Johnson's think it worth while to give me a stone, let it be placed over me so as to protect me." "Bless not thyself only," says the great Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici, "that thou wast born in Athens; but, among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one hand to heaven, that thou wert born of honest parents, that modesty, humility, and veracity, lay in the same egg, and came into the world with thee. From such foundations thou mayest be happy in a virtuous precocity, and make an early and long walk in goodness; so mayest thou

A hideous sight.

Reckless marriage.

It

more naturally feel the contrariety of vice
unto nature, and resist some by the anti-
dote of thy temper." Dr. Young writes of
"That hideous sight, a naked human
heart." "I saw," says Leigh Hunt, “a
worse sight than the heart, in a journey
which I took in a neighboring county.
was an infant, all over sores, and cased in
steel; the result of the irregularities of its
father; and I confess that I would rather
have seen the heart of the very father of
that child, than I would the child himself.
I am sure it must have bled at the sight.
I am sure there would have been a feeling
of some sort to vindicate nature, granting
that up to that moment the man had been
a fool or even a scoundrel." An eminent
writer upon Responsibility in Mental Dis-
ease remarks, "When one considers the
reckless way in which persons, whatever
the defects of their mental and bodily con-
stitution, often get married, without sense
of responsibility for the miseries which
they entail upon those who will be the
heirs of their infirmities, without regard, in
fact, to anything but their own present
gratification, one is driven to think either
that man is not the preeminently reason-
ing and moral animal which he claims to

quences.

be, or that there is in him an instinct which is deeper than knowledge. He has persuaded himself, rightly or wrongly, that in this case there is in the feeling of love between the sexes something of so sacred and mysterious a character as to justify disregard to consequences in marriage. ConseWe have only to look at the large part which love fills in novels, poetry, and painting; and to consider what a justification. of unreason in life it is held to be, to realize what a hold it has on him in his present state of development, and what a repugnance there would be to quench its glow by cold words of reason. At bottom, how

ever, there is nothing particularly holy about it; on the contrary, it is a passion which man shares with other animals; and when its essential nature and function are regarded, we shall nowhere find stronger evidence of a community of nature between man and animals. It would not be a very absurd thing if an ingenious person, considering curiously what a solemn under- A solemn taking marriage is, and what serious re- ing. sponsibilities it entails, were to maintain that men and women should enter into it soberly and rather sadly, under a grave sense of responsibility, as upon an un

undertak