the fawning, begging letters, circulars of tradesmen, of secretaries of institutions, and of others which are sent to them? They must be blind indeed if they do. The truth is, they are nauseated with these things, and are much given to doubt; a certain amount of money must be tickled out of their purses, and they know it. That man must be a gull indeed who, by the time he is forty, does not know that half, if not all, of the touchings of hat, bowings, and observance paid to him are paid to his place and money alone.

A rich man, then, has his trials. Carlyle, who is generally manly enough, writes about a reverse of fortune, in his peculiar style, thus :-"O Poverty! or what is called a reverse of fortune, amongst the many bitter ingredients that thou hast in thy most bitter cup, thou hast not one so insupportably bitter as that which brings us in hourly contact with the earthenware and huckaback beings of the nether world. Even to the vulgarity of inanimate things it requires some time to get accustomed; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha enough to destroy any comfort." There may be some sense in this, but it is hardly sound Carlylese to have one's stomach turned so against the poor. Close contact with the ignorant, rough, and cunning is not pleasant; but rich men suffer more than poor ones. Moreover, in writing of Poverty, I do not refer only to a reverse of fortune. When we bear cold, we find it pleasant through custom; when we bear heat, it is the same; but if we go from heat to cold suddenly, we feel it—if from cold to heat, we are stifled. Nor is poverty necessarily to be coupled with vulgarity. Many of the poor have a delicacy of sentiment and feeling which

would do honour to princes. Little vulgar street-boys fight, and shout, and swear; but the rich hear them as well as the poor; and there are thousands of children living at home, in poor homes it may be, but with peace, order, and quiet about them. The kindness, love, and charity which exist amongst the poor are very delightful. When we know that at every quarter our income will come in, it is not much to spare a ten-pound note from it; but the heart warms with the true fire of charity when we drop our last penny; and the eye of One who spake as no man ever spake did not rest upon the rich men who poured in their offerings to the treasury, but on the poor widow who came timidly and dropped in her mite.

The human heart-" thanks to the human heart by which we live," writes Wordsworth, which was and is good in all ages, let who will abuse it-has, without sacred teachers, long found out the blessings of poverty. Lucan says that it is the greatest good that Heaven can bestow upon man, but that it is very seldom understood; that it is really and truly a gift of the gods. Livy tells us that the worst pinch of poverty is appearing ashamed of it; and Horace assures us that " we may cease complaining, for

"He is not poor to whom kind Nature grants,

E'en with a frugal hand, what Nature wants."

And, he adds, if a man has enough to eat, to drink, and to wear, he has all that the greatest kings have. But it is not in speaking only that the great men of past ages showed their true appreciation of wealth. Socrates went about meanly clad, and without show, seeking wisdom, not from

the learned or the rich, but from the working men and the poor. Diogenes despised the follies of riches, and lived upon just what he could get; other wise men called property and possessions the "baggage of life;" that is, they likened them to the baggage that goes with an army, and which, of course, always hinders the march of that army.

But, beyond all these, we know that poverty brings blessed trials, and that it does, as a rule, tend to make men better. Most of us have seldom known a good man who has not had his trials, his troubles, and his losses. If not poor, he has in some measure been so. Those trials have made him know his true friends, and have made him appreciate true men, like Lear in the storm, who tears off his clothes and cries, “Off, off, you' lendings; come, unbutton, here!" showing that his misfortune had made him understand acutely enough that his rank, his kingship, and the respect men once paid him were indeed mere lendings, like his fine clothes.

Men who suffer poverty need, however, occasional consolation and comfort; and it may serve them somewhat to know that there are many who believe that, in this life at least, they have the best of it, whilst it is certain that they have the best chance of the other—that is, if they make use of the lessons which poverty teaches them. But, more than this, Poverty, like its great sister Necessity-if, indeed, they are not one and the same is the mother of all great things. Few, if any, great men have been born of the rich; poor living is almost always the companion of high thinking. Poverty only falls heavily upon the mean and ignoble he who chooses to bear it will find it the nurse of manly energy, the

friend of purity, the instigator of great deeds and high enterprises. If any man doubt this, let him take a biographical dictionary and count up the number of great men who have risen from the cottages of the poor. Does he want to see the birthplace of Locke or Shakspere?—they are cottages. Does he ask who Ferguson, the astronomer, and Giotto, the great painter, were?—they were shepherd-boys; and, moreover, they were always poor. If, therefore, we want to meditate upon great things, to see the real faces, and not the masks of men, to find out our true friends, to avoid fawners and flatterers, to hear the truth—a bitter, but a kindly, healthy tonic-to know ourselves and others, to forget man, and to be brought nearer to God and to the eternal realities, let us not despise Poverty, nor crave—as all must who pick up gold too eagerly—after riches.

ZEALOUS PEOPLE.

T is related of the founder of Quakerism—a man in the main utterly prosaic, a sensible, keen, cold

man, conscientious, but not incapable, as time should serve, of a falsehood-that upon one occasion he was moved by the Spirit to go into a field, to take his shoes off, and to pray, and that the result of this prayer was that he walked barefoot through the city adjoining to the field, crying out, " Woe, woe, woe! Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!" It is not necessary to add that the Almighty did not visit Lichfield with any extra miseries on this account. Indeed, George Fox seems to have been very much annoyed and hurt at this seeming dereliction of himself by the Great Power. Why should we not send forth our curses, loud and deep, against wickedness? Why should we not call down fire from heaven against sin? If we are enthusiasts, and young, we often do so; but, after a while, we find that sin quietly grows, and is green, and fresh, and flourishes; that the worm does not gnaw the plant that we have cursed, but that it does gnaw the gourd which we love and cherish for the shade it gives