rather the more friends, although two clung to Will Shakspeare, and one was absolutely sure that he had met with it in Dryden's poems. It is to be found, we believe, in Pope's Imitation of Horace's Second Satire :

"There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl,

The feast of reason and the flow of soul."

On the contrary, the mention of the famous couplet, "He who fights and runs away

May live to fight another day,"

excited great unanimity. Of the original locality of those lines there was no doubt. They were of course in Butler's Hudibras. The stalwart knight, with all his various accomplishments in war, love and theology, cannot, however, be held responsible for the couplet. Nor is it to be found in any part of Samuel Butler's works. We have never seen it elsewhere than in Pope's Letters, and we have no doubt that the little man of Twickenham threw off the rhymes in sport, while writing to his friend.

The newspaper scribblers are somewhat addicted to the use of the phrase " hide their diminished heads." Their “ odorous" comparisons would hardly be complete without it. Few of these, however, may suspect, that it is an extract from the finest address, which Milton puts into the mouth of Satan. He is appealing to the sun :

-At whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads,-

. The expression-" confusion worse confounded"-has passed into such indifferent use that very few would think of claiming for it anything but a vulgar paternity; yet it originated in the Second book of Paradise Lost, where we are told also that Death,

"-Grinned horribly a ghastly smile;"

a quotation which school-boys have made as familiar as is the hackneyed passage from Thomson's "Spring" to their masters: Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,

And teach the young idea how to shoot."

It is Thomson's Musidora, too, who is compared to the Venus de Medici in that glorious line:

"So stands the statue that enchants the world."

Although Lawrence Sterne is the author of that charming allusion to the merciful care of Providence; "He tempers the wind

to the shorn lamb;" yet we are justified in inferring that it is generally believed to have a more "inspired" source. We have even labored hard to convince a pastor, who used the phrase, that it was from the pen of the sensual and volatile biographer of "Tristram Shandy."

Few poets escape without being charged, from some quarter, with inditing

"Thoughts that breathe and words that burn,"

but we never admired it half so much elsewhere as we do in Gray's Ode on the Progress of Poesy, where it is fitly and generously applied to Dryden :

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Hark, his hands the lyre explore!

Bright-eyed fancy, hovering o'er,
Scatters from her pictured urn

Thoughts that breathe and words that burn."

Milton is much oftener quoted than read.

words

Those charming

"Grace was in all her steps; heaven in her eye;
In every gesture dignity and love"-

were first used by him in honor of the mother of us all. It is in his Comus, that we find that delicious description of exquisite

music:

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-I was all ear;

And took in strains that might create a soul

Under the ribs of death."

It was his sublime fortitude, which found utterance in the last sonnet he ever wrote, addressed to Cyriac Skinner :

"Yet 1 argue, not

Against Heaven's hand or will, or bate a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
Right onward.”

It was he, and not Shakspeare, who has expressed, in "Comus," that sincere opinion of his heart :

"How charming is divine Philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute;

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,

Where no rude surfeit reigns."

Campbell is generally acknowledged the author of the line,

"Like angel's visits, few and far between :"

but he unquestionably borrowed it from Blair's "Grave," in which we find the verse :

"Like angels' visits, short and far between"

a less tautological phrase than Campbell's copy of it. Good quotations are "great wit," and Pope says that

Great wit is nature to advantage drest:

What oft is thought, but ne'er so well exprest.

In justice, therefore, these scintillations of lordly minds ought not to be parodied by mis-quotation. The forcible and eloquent passage in Scripture-" in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," -is commonly refined and enfeebled into the sentence: "in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." One compiler of hymnbooks, displeased with the "amatory expression," (as he said,) of the exquisite lines:

"Jesus, lover of my soul,

Let me to thy bosom fly”—

has altered it into "Jesus, Saviour, &c. :"- -a most useless sacrilege. We often hear the line:

"Small by degrees and beautifully less ;"

but this we suppose is a modern improvement on Matthew Prior's admirable couplet :

"That air and harmony of shape express,

Fine by degrees, yet beautifully less."

One of the favorite novelists of the day, in his last work, seems to quote Juvenal from imagination rather than memory, and furnishes his readers with the following prodigy of metre: "Vacuus viator cantabit ante latronem."

We are safe in saying that the most promising pupil in scanning within our broad land cannot make a hexameter of the line, or justify the use of ante made in it. Juvenal wrote a verse, illustrating the happiness of having nothing to lose, in which he says that a penniless traveller can afford to be very jolly even in the presence of a bandit: but he expressed himself thus :

"Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator."

To crown the joke, the author of Charles O'Malley introduces the quotation twice into his book, and each time with the same blunders.

LITTLE THINGS.

It is bad policy to despise small persons or small things. A single grape-shot settles the destiny of an empire, and a diamond necklace has contributed largely to a bloody revolution. The gabbling of geese saved Rome from an overthrow. The accidental position of two spectacle-glasses at proper focal distances. gave the world the telescope. The fall of an apple revealed to Newton the law which hangs the worlds in space-the grandest law of the material universe. The clinking of two hammers of different weights upon a blacksmith's anvil suggested to Pythogoras the first hints of the mathematical relations of musical sounds, upon which he laid the superstructure of musical science. The disputatious temper of a college boy upset the philosophy of Aristotle and established forever the Baconian system together with its magnificent application by Newton. We are ourselves too small, our faculties have a range too narrow--to make it right for us to despise small things; for it is only through them. that we become acquainted with great things. We cannot comprehend a great truth by intuition. It is only by learning now and then and here and there a small truth, that we are enabled to ferret out and at last construct the great idea which we seek. And especially is our destiny suspended on slight and trival things, and he who despises them despises the law of his own life, fortune and happiness.

A friend at our elbow suggests that we have told only half the truth about the geese. Although these bipeds warned Rome of the invasion of the Gauls and thereby saved that ancient republic, it is certain also, that the gabbling of some modern goslings has caused serious disasters to our own. He insists also that two spectacle-glasses, placed at improper distances from a key-hole, have caused a great deal of trouble in families. The apple too, he says, which suggested to Newton the law of gravitation, hardly compensated for the evil effects of that other apple, which brought upon mankind the law of sin and death. The musical hammers of Pythagoras bear no honorable comparison in his view with that single hammer of Luther, which nailed to the door of the church the memorable theses, that hammer, the echo of which still rings in the ears of mankind and shook irrecoverably the most powerful Empire that ever lorded over the world.

INNOVATIONS IN MEDICINE.

There is no art or profession which receives more benefit from innovation than medicine. Whether the new systems adopted so extensively, are so much better or so much worse than the old, it is not proper for us to inquire in this place. Nor do we care to show that they are not, or are, spiced with manifest humbug, and are or are not dependent on the credulity of mankind for success. The theory of homeopathy may be practically worthless. The idea of giving such extremely small doses, as evidently not to have any effect on the system whatever, may be preposterous, or it may be founded on some really sound principle, -the principle, for instance, that nature, assisted by the confidence of the patient, is the best cure of most diseases. Just so, the abstract idea of hydropathy may be utterly ridiculous; the notion that all diseases are to be cured by external applications of water may be at variance with common sense; and then again the principle, that the excitement of the system, the vital activity of the patient, a positive struggle of the body against disease, are among the best and most reliable instrumentalities for regaining health, may be incalculably valuable.

It is on these accounts, that we claim that it is beneficial to "cross" the petrified system of the Faculty with new ideas, even if they be extreme and somewhat tainted with absurdity. The extreme notions of the homeopathist gradually convince the public that the enormous doses in vogue under the old practice, which paralyze the system, debilitate the body, reduce the patient to a medicine-sickness before he can be recovered from disease, are, some how or other, unnecessary and unprofitable. A man gets well with the infinitesimal doses of the disciple of Hahnemann. You will now try in vain to thrust a tumbler-full of nauseous stuff down the throat of his next door neighbor. The old practice becomes modified-must be modified to suit public opinion.

Again, under the old system, a poor wretch, who feels qualms of disease, must first of all be convinced that he is sick, helpless, forlorn, and must at once retire to his bed and become a mere receptacle of pills, potions and powders. He must lie on his