modern statue there is a great melting down of old bronze. The essence of originality is not that it creates new material, or even necessarily invents new combinations of material, but that it imparts new life to whatever it discovers or combines, whether of new or old. Shakspeare's genius is at no other time so incontestably sovereign as when he borrows most, when he adapts or moulds, in a manner so perfect as to resemble a new creation, the old chronicles and "Italian originals," which have been awaiting the vivida vis that makes them live and move. Non nova, sed nové, sums up the whole philosophy of the subject. "Originality," says an able writer, never works more fruitfully than in a soil rich and deep with the foliage of ages."

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The word same is often used in a way that leads to error. Persons say the same when they mean similar. It has been asked whether the ship Argo, in which Jason sought the Golden Fleece, and whose decaying timbers, as she lay on the Greek shore, a grateful and reverent nation had patched up, till, in process of time, not a plank of the original ship was left, was still the same ship as of old. The question presents no difficulty, if we remember that sameness, that is, identity, is an absolute term, and can be affirmed or denied only in an absolute sense. No man is the same man to-day that he was yesterday, though he may be very similar to his yesterday's self.

I never learned rhetorike certain;

Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.- CHAUCER.

Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas, one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea.ISAAC WATTS.

If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should perplex and subtilize the signification of sounds.-LOCKE.

IT

T has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that "the words whose ambiguity is the most frequently overlooked, and produces the greatest amount of confusion of thought and fallacy are the commonest," the very ones whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. "Familiar acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate. knowledge." Such a word is luxury.

A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these days is the luxury and extravagance of the American people, especially of the nouveaux riches whose fortunes have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim thus against luxury,- that is, against the use of things which, at any particular period, are not deemed indispensable to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is not luxury a purely relative term? Is there a single article of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced an absolute luxury, without regard to the wealth or poverty of him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one

generation or country the necessaries of another? Persons who are familiar with history know that Alfred the Great had not a chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry off his smoke; that William the Conqueror was unacquainted with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can bet called one; that the early aristocracy of England lived on the ground-floor, without drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts were deemed a useless superfluity, and men were even put in the pillory for wearing them; that night shirts were esteemed a still more needless luxury, and persons of all ranks and classes slept in the first costume of Adam; that travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of modern effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the most brilliant epochs of England's annals ate with their fingers, generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare table; and that when forks were introduced, they were long hotly opposed as an extravagance, and even denounced by many as a device of Satan, to offer an affront to Providence, who had provided man with fingers to convey his food to his mouth. In the introduction to Hollinshed's "Chronicles," published in 1577, there is a bitter complaint of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the exchange of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of wooden platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place, the writer laments that oak only is used for building, instead of willow as heretofore; adding, that "formerly our houses indeed were of willow, but our men were of oak; but now that our houses are of oak, our men are not only of willow, but some altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration."

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WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.

Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale constituted the chief part of Queen Elizabeth's breakfast, and that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in Chicago who does not enjoy fare which would have been deemed luxurious by men of high station in the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shopkeeper who does not occupy a house which English nobles in 1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or factory girl who does not on Sundays adorn herself with apparel which would have excited the admiration of the duchesses in Queen Elizabeth's ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts for the degeneracy of the Persians by their luxury, which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that they used gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout the larger part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders, bathing-tubs, and a hundred other things now deemed indispensable to the health or comfort of civilized man, would be regarded as proofs of effeminacy and extravagance.

Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denunciation by poets and moralists from time immemorial. But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so pernicious as those springing from that indifference to comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with the name of contentment, but which is only another name for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodigality and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of life, by a too feeble development of those desires to gratify which the mass of men are striving. It is a bad

sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of life, and aspiring to nothing higher; and equally ominous is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied with the capital and glories it has already accumulated. Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality, it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being, and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. He must have many difficulties to contend with,—many clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify,-if you would bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they are always grumbling,- because, dissatisfied amid the most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more and more of what Voltaire calls les superflues choses, si nécessaires,—that the English people have reached their present pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth which almost enables them to defy a hostile world.

Among the familiar words that we employ few have been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry than nature and art. There are many persons who oppose the teaching of elocution, because they like a natural and artless eloquence, to which, they think, all elaborate training is opposed. Yet nothing is more certain than that. Nature and Art, between which there is supposed to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often the very same thing. What is more natural than that a man who lacks vocal power should cultivate and develop his voice by vocal exercises; or that, if he is conscious of faults in his manner of speaking, his articulation, gestures, etc.- he should try,