should be 292 certain voyage, and should reserve their Rejoicings rejoicings for the journey's end, when, reserved. having acted well their parts, they might fairly claim a nunc plaudite." "If you have seen the picture-gallery of any one. old family," says Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop, "you will remember how the same face and figure-often the fairest and slightest of them all-come upon you in different generations; and how you trace the same sweet girl through a long line of portraits never growing old or changing -the Good Angel of the race-abiding by them in all reverses- redeeming all their sins." Education, in the opinion of "Compare," he Ribot, is a sum of habits. Education a sum of habits. says, "the savage with the accomplished humane, charitable in time of peace, giving themselves up to every excess as soon as war has broken out. The reason of this awakens. is that war, being a return to the savage What war state, awakens the primitive nature of man, as it subsisted prior to culture, and brings it back with all its heroic daring, its worship of force, and its boundless lusts. In China, when a man has committed a capital crime, a minute inquiry is first made into his physical condition, his temperament, his mental complexion, his prior acts; nor does the investigation stop at the individual it is concerned with the most inconsiderable antecedents of the members of his family, and is even carried back to his ancestry. In the case of high treason, or when a prince is assassinated, the Chinese prescribe that the culprit shall be cut up into ten thousand pieces, and that his sons Sons and grandsons and grandsons shall be put to death.'" In put to death Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, there is an authentic account of a habit occurring in individuals. of three consecutive generations. It was, when each lay fast asleep on his back in bed, of raising his right arm slowly in front of his face, up to his forehead, and then dropping it with a jerk, so that the wrist fell heavily on the bridge of his nose. The trick did not occur every night, but occasionally, and was independent of any ascerRabelais' tained cause. Rabelais felt sure that he princely inclinations. must have been the son of a king, because nobody had more princely inclinations. “We incline in the same manner," says the author of Wishing-Cap Papers, “to be so young in our feelings, and to desire such a good long life before us to do a world of things in, that it seems as if we had a right to it. Mortality is a good provision, considering that the world has not come to its state of enjoyment, and that people in general, by the time they are forty, hardly know what to do with their Sundays; but an exception might be made, we think, in favor of those who could оссиру all their hours some way or other a hundred years to come, and who have not yet got over their love even of gingerbread." "If by the visitation of God," writes Holmes in his remarkable Elsie Venner, "a person receives any injury which impairs the intellect or the moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such a person by our common working standards of right and wrong? Certainly, everybody will answer, in cases where there Impaired intellect or moral perceptions. unseen is a palpable organic change brought about, as when a blow on the head produces insanity. Fools! How long will it be before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that A thousand cripple, each of them, some one or more of mutilations. our highest faculties." The same author in his Mechanism in Thought and Morals, expresses the view that "When we can take the dimensions of virtue by triangulation; when we can literally weigh Justice in her own scales; when we can speak of the specific gravity of truth, or the square root of honesty; when we can send a statesman his integrity in a package to Washington, if he happen to have left it behind - then we may begin to speak of the moral Moral character of character of inherited tendencies, which inherited belong to the machinery on which the Sovereign Power alone is responsible. The misfortune of perverse instincts, which adhere to us as congenital inheritances, should go to our side of the account, if the books of heaven are to be kept as the great Church of Christendom maintains they are, by double entry." tendencies. THE Farquhar. La Fontaine. Joubert had a habit, from his twentieth year to his seventieth, of jotting down with a pencil the best issues of his meditation as they arose, and out of this chaos of notes was shaped, many years after his death, a full volume of Thoughts. "If there be a man," he said, "plagued with the accursed ambition of putting a whole volume into a page, a whole page into a sentence, and that sentence into a word, it is I." When Farquhar was near the end of his gay yet checkered career, death, the glory of his last success, and the thought of his children, pressing hard upon him, he wrote this laconic, but perfectly intelligible, note to Wilks: "Dear Bob, - I have not anything to leave thee, to perpetuate my memory, but two helpless girls; look upon them sometimes, and think of him that was, to the last moment of his life, George Farquhar." Farquhar's confidence in his friend was like that of La Fontaine, who, having lost a home, was met in the street by a friend who invited him to his. "I was going there," said the simple. minded poet. Wilks did not disappoint Farquhar's expectations. Quin had withdrawn to Bath. Garrick's triumphs had soured him. He desired to be asked back |