In private life it is, of course, impossible to stop scandal; but we are not obliged to listen to it: if we do, the best way is to believe at most only half of that which we hear, and when a story is told against another, if it be true, never to repeat it, because it is charity to cover over the defects of our fellows; if it be false, then for the greater reason let the calumny rest in our own bosom. A little good-nature will go much further than a great deal of acuteness in blunting the edge of bad reports. The ill news, which travels fast, does not travel so fast but that it picks up something in its way; and, as a mere matter of precaution to guard ourselves against deceit, we should shut our ears against scandal. A common source of this foolish and detestably silly vice -a too common source-is the determination which some persons have to find a motive for everything they hear of, or for every action that is reported to them. In the often-quoted line from the comedy a gentleman says, "No scandal about Queen Elizabeth, I hope ?" but how many scandals has that Queen had to bear! People will even now warmly dispute about her, tell her motives, her love, her anger, her ambition; but who truly knows? We scandalize those living: we insult, prejudge, and lie about the dead. When the purpose of a great person is most obvious, the watchers of the action will misinterpret it. Did you see how Cæsar smiled, or how Frederick turned to one of his generals and took snuff? Think that the fate of empires depends upon the way that Alexander struts; or how much wisdom there is in the shake of Lord Burleigh's head! These little motions are great in the eyes of slaves and snobs, and upon them they build the most portentous omens. Like the horse's eye, the tongue of the news monger and tale-bearer magnifies, and will make something dreadful as about to occur from those simple words which Goldsmith puts into the mouths of the two vulgar women in his charming novel: "Well,” replied our peeress, "this you may depend upon as a fact, that the next morning my lord duke cried out three times to his valet-de-chambre, ‘Jernigan! Jernigan! Jernigan! bring me my garters.' The reader is left to imagine what enormous mystery could be made out of that very simple exclamation. N ON BOOK LOVE. |E who leads the "Gentle Life" can hardly do so well without the aid of those sweetest of con solers and gentlest of advisers, good books. And thank Heaven for the abundance of good books that we have! Like fruit or flowers, or mosses and ferns, we have them in a copious variety, and, of those which have not died down, but which yet live to teach our children's children, of marvellous excellence. Many good books, too, like good deeds, are choked by the abundance of the crop, and fade out of memory and existence, never to be resuscitated. Keats had some such thought of his first poem when he wrote, "It is just that this youngster should die away; a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that, while it is dwindling, I may be plotting and fitting myself for verses fit to live." And this was of the poem whose opening lines declare that "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever;" nay, that "Its loveliness increases; it can never But, if books die, it is some consolation for the tribe the members of which live as it were upon each other, to reflect that the thoughts contained in those books cannot die. They are perennial, and will spring up, year after year, for ever. What should we do without books? Can any one conceive the blank despair, the dense ignorance, that would be inevitable without letters? Why does not some one build a statue to Cadmus, who is said to have invented them? The phonetic alphabet of the Phoenicians-still, with small variation, the alphabet of each European nation—is the prop of learning, wealth, health, and intelligence; equally the friend of the farmer, shopman, shipman, statesman, scholar, student, chemist, workman, and parson. These phonetic letters, how different from hieroglyphics! They help us all. If we are sick, we fly to them; if we are in health, we enjoy them: in prosperity they divert us; in poverty they console us. When we are fresh to the world they amuse, teach, instruct, and delight us; when we are leaving it they instil a consolation in a sweeter faith; and there is one book which, with a magic key, opens unto us the very gates of heaven. A blessing upon all books! Tyrants and conquerors do not like them: pestilent enemies to them are books. Cæsar, or his heavy soldiers, burnt the library at Alexandria. War hates and abjures books: peace loves them. Let us hug ourselves that we have still peace in England, and talk for a while about books. That was not a bad thought of Cicero's, when he called a library the soul of a house. It is so. The fine parlours are the body, clothed fairly; the kitchen is at once its palate and its stomach; but the library is its soul or its soul's pleasure house. "Books," says Rogers, "breathe a soul into the silent walls " "Are prompt to charm with many a converse sweet; Seneca, a clever, cool old heathen, whose books were better than his life, said that “books were his dear friends ;” and he carries on the simile by telling us to be careful in our choice of them, just as we should be of our friends. And the simile may be carried further still. A man with one book—that is, one book which he studies above others-is a wise, staunch man, hardly to be deceived, his wisdom cropping up in magic sentences. A man of many books, and a man of many friends, is a diverse man, a many-sided one, amiable, catholic, good-tempered, beloved, and easily accessible, as well as generally sought; but he is not, perhaps, a deep man. Then, again, a man may read many books, and yet love only two or three. He cannot love all, although, as Charles Lamb said, he may be a very glutton of books, and may have an appetite for all books except such as are not books; "biblia a biblia, books which are no books ;" and Lamb quaintly reckons among these, arithmetics, Hume's History of England, backgammon-boards bound as books, and other simulacra, such as are seen in libraries, and never taken down to be read, court-guides, clergy-lists, law-lists, dry treatises on equity, written with such "profound learning" as to bother the cause, treatises on fluxions, dynamics, and the integral calculus, volumes of savage and often insulting tracts. A man may get some amusement out of them, but it must be on shipboard or in a desert. Some people |