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Is not the mind unsoundly sensitive that finds an offence in a request like that? You could not have warranted manly Samuel Johnson sound, on the points of prejudice and bigotry. There was something unsound in that unreasoning hatred of everything Scotch. Rosseau was altogether a screw. He was mentally lame, broken-winded, a shyer, a kicker, a jibber, a biter: he would do anything but run right on and do his duty. Shelley was a notorious screw. I should say, indeed, that his unsoundness passed the limit of practical sanity, and that on certain points he was unquestionably mad. You could not have warranted Keats sound. You could not deny the presence of a little perverse twist even in the noble mind and heart of the great Sir Charles Napier. The great Emperor Napoleon was cracky, if not cracked, on various points. There was unsoundness in his strange belief in his Fate. Neither Bacon nor Newton were entirely sound. But the mention of Newton suggests to me the single specimen of human kind who might stand even before him: and reminds me that Shakspeare was as sound as any mortal can be. Any defect in him extends no farther than to his taste: and possibly where we should differ from him, he is right and we are wrong. You could not say that Shakspeare was mentally a screw. The noblest of all genius is sober and reasonable: it is among geniuses of the second order that you find something so warped, so eccentric, so abnormal, as to come up to our idea of a screw. Sir Walter Scott was sound: save perhaps in the matter of his veneration for George IV., and of his desire to take rank as one of the country gentlemen of Roxburghshire.—Fraser.

BRILLIANT EXAMPLES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BODY BY VIOLENT EXERCISE.

LORD MONBODDO would never enter a carriage, even in the severest weather, since he looked upon it as unjustifiable effeminacy. He rode annually from Edinburgh to London, and took other long journeys on horseback, and was also remarkable for his attachment to friction and other modes of exercise. Although compelled to breathe impure air, and subjected to other deleterious influences, he lived to the age of ninety, and nearly up to the last found himself hale and vigorous. Few distinguished men of any age or country but what took a great amount of exercise when young, and thus laid in a stock

of vitality for future years, or else made up in after life for the misfortunes of their youth. Cicero is described by Plutarch as being at one period of his life extremely thin and slender, having such a weakness in his stomach that he could eat but little, and that not till late in the evening. He travelled to Athens for the recovery of his health, where his body was so strengthened by gymnastic exercises as to become firm and robust; and his voice, which had been harsh, was thoroughly formed, and rendered sweet, full, and sonorous.

Julius Cæsar, too, was originally of a slender habit of body, was troubled with pains in the head, and was subject to epilepsy; but influenced by the example of Cicero and other contemporaries, he found in those exercises the best medicine for his indisposition, as afterwards he went through long marches, fared on coarse diet, frequently sleeping in the fields, and continued for years exposed to all the hardships of laborious wars.

Most of the world's geniuses have worked hard, either at manual labour or at special exercises. Christopher North excelled in all rural sports, and was also known as being an excellent gymnast. Shakespeare, while composing his immortal plays, is said to have carried brick and mortar to build places for their performance. John Wesley took laborious exercise, and was a great walker. Elihu Burritt, the learned blacksmith, worked daily eight hours at the anvil. Sir Walter Scott, after confining himself for several days to his desk, would mount his horse, call out his dogs, and follow the chase for days in succession, till he had restored his prostrated energies, and then return to his study. Byron, in his young days, took extremely severe exercise, and lived an abstemious life, to increase his personal beauty. Daniel Webster was inured to severe labour, and took much daily exercise in later life. Franklin was a hard-working printer. Washington was a farmer and a ploughman, and worked as hard as any one on his farm. Burns, the Scottish poet, composed most and the best of his poetry when at work on a farm. The old Roman and Grecian orators took a great amount of exercise, in order to prepare themselves for public speaking; for the ancients knew that no one can have a good voice without having a good muscular system.

THERE was a rule in an old debating society which might be advantageously recommended to the House of Commons. ing to speak the whole evening, shall nave a room Any gentleman wishto himself."

THOUGHTS UPON THE WALL. THERE are two kinds of beauty connected with natural and artistic objects; the one a beauty inherent and per se, the other a beauty of associated ideas and feelings. Some writers, of whom Mr. Alison may be considered the chief, have come to the conclusion that all our pleasures of taste, all our impressions of beauty, are grounded upon this principle of association. The entire correctness of this may well be doubted; but there can be no doubt of its being partially true, and that in all philosophical theories of beauty, this principle of association must be taken as an essential element. A happy thing it is for us, a merciful susceptibility of our nature, that we are able sometimes to link a beautiful thought or feeling with but an indifferently beautiful object, and to extract, not exactly sunbeams from cucumbers, but sermons from stones, and good from everything. Powerful among this class of suggestive things are pictures in a room. They might do much for the rustic and the labourer; and not only for them, but for that immensely large class, also, who occupy the broad margin between the rich and the poor-the smallsalaried clerk and inferior tradesman; a class who have to maintain a worldly appearance with marvellously little of worldly means. Expensive works of art are, of course, quite out of the question in homes like these; but there are such things as cheap prints, and paintings of moderate value, which, without any great merit of execution, exhibit a beautiful scene or incident, and exhale poetic influences to awaken holy associations of ideas.

We remember once, after a day of difficulty and sorrow, drinking tea in the parlour of a small neat dwelling, in the suburbs of the metropolis. The walls were decorated with prints, framed and glazed, the whole value of which was, perhaps, not over £5, but which, owing to a pervading beauty of sentiment, was of more value to the looker on than many of the productions of the magnates of the artist world. We thought it very delightful, we remember, after a day of disappointment and care spent in London streets, amidst all its excitement and hurly-burly, its noise and confusion and feverish antagonisms, to repose the eye upon a coloured print representing a rural scene. It was on the shore of a lake in Switzerland; the time was evening, and the golden light of the declining sun glittered in a long path of glory over the calm water. Conspicuous on the mountain

slopes, on its borders, rose a picturesque building, which seemed to be an old timehallowed chapel, with ivy round its pointed windows and downy moss clustering on its roof and walls. A little below stood the scattered dwellings of the hamlet; the cattle wended homeward from the pasture, and a rosy maiden in lace boddice, standing on a knoll of the high land, might be imagined as singing the Ranz des Vaches, and beckoning her herd to the homestead. Now all this was done in a very plain and homely manner, and there was nothing whatever in the execution to throw an artist into ecstacies, or tempt him into comparisons with the masters, ancient or modern: but, for all that, there was a sort of blessedness about the humble picture,— a suggestion of stillness and repose, a heavenly hush for both the struggles of the spirit and the toils of the body, peculiarly needful and appropriate to contemplate in contrast to the din and strife and soul-absorbing competition of the fevered city.

On one side of this picture hung a chalk drawing, very respectably done, a copy from some old head of the Redeemer, conceived as under suffering. Here the agonized, but patient and resigned, features led back the imaginative gazer, through a long vista of centuries, to the time when children clustered round the knees of Him who blessed them; when the high road to Jerusalem resounded with tumultuous "Hosannas,"when the garden of Gethsemane witnessed His tears of agony, and the Hall of Judgment rung with the scoffs and insults of a brutalized rabble, whilst their unoffending victim "answered not a word." The whole sequence of that gracious life passes in review, from the disputations in the Temple to the bleeding on Calvary; and the heart that sinks under the sorrows and trials of the present time revives, and fortifies itself with courage in remembering His sufferings and the gentle heroism with which they were borne.

On the opposite side of the Swiss scene before described, hung a very fair print of Shakspere. This, again, was richly suggestive. That noble arch of forehead, those deep, full, eloquent eyes, that earnest mouth, all concur to testify that this was a MAN,a myriad-minded man. And when the mind recalls the immense variety of his creations, the versatility of his genius, the wondrous breadth of his observation and sympathy; when the awakened fancy unfolds its panorama of enchanted isles, forests of Arden, Windsor meads enlivened with the gaiety of merry wives; the rolling ocean bearing

on its rough waves the cradle of the gentle Perdita; wild and blasted heaths and stormy battle plains; Portia's villa, and the moon-lit bank where sounds of music crept into lovers' ears; Venetian banquets, glittering with light and sounding with music and revelry, where Romeo loved and Juliet gave her heart away, the garden where they woo'd and the tomb where they died, when the fancy envelopes itself with these scenes, and innumerable others, suggested by the portrait of Shakespere, does not the narrow thought swell into magnitude? Do not confined sympathies expand? and does not a selfish fretfulness melt into a generous glow at the joys and sorrows of all humanity?

On an opposite wall of the room hung the representation of a large Indiaman outward bound, struggling in a violent gale of wind. How sublime the terrors of the scene! The vessel on its beam-ends in a trough of boiling surge, the splintered masts, the torn fluttering sails, the dark night all around, with massive storm clouds hurling from their black bosoms long, forky flashes of lurid fire! With such a picture do there not arise ideas of Him "who holdeth the waters in the hollow of his hand," "who maketh the clouds his chariot, and rideth on the wings of the wind? What generous sympathies well from the heart towards the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude," the brave mariner at the helm, the calm captain on the poop, the awe-struck passengers -some thinking of home and the tranquil life of their early days, contrasted with their present danger some stupified with terror, and some calmly resigned to death, even in the dark gurgling water. 'Tis but fancy's sketch; but of such fancies beautiful emotions may be born.

There were other prints in the room, of more or less interest; but enough of description has been given to illustrate the moral suggestive value of pictures in the room. We mean, of course, pictures with a certain poetry of meaning about them; not flaring portraits of kings and queens and generals; not theatrical monstrosities, representing Mr. Wallack as Pizarro, or 0. Smith as Three-fingered Jack; not disgusting representations of Tom Spring and Dutch Sam; not vulgar drawings of prize heifers and over-fed pigs;-none of these things, but prints, humble in character and inexpensive it may be, but with some pregnancy of subject, some suggestions of love and peace and beauty and goodness, leading the beholder to endeavours to make life fairer in this world and fitter for a world to come.

THE SUPERIORITY OF HORSELOVING PEOPLE.

WE are, in truth, above all other nations, a horse-loving nation. To us riding seems nature; with us, men, women, and children are alike infected with the passion. Those who cannot ride delight to watch those who do ride; our chief national amusements are connected with the use of horses; and the most dignified of our Houses of Parliament thinks a discussion of the weights that racehorses should carry no waste of its time. Nor let us in our gravity deem this turn of the national taste a thing wholly insignificant and immaterial. In the world's history it has happened too often to be wholly an accidental coincidence, that national supremacy has fallen to the nation which was distinguished by pre-eminence on horseback. Were those old fables of Centaurs and Amazons not based on a dim perception of this truth, when they taught that the first horsemen were half divine, and the first horsewomen more than a match for men? Shall we recall the first great monarchy of the old world, established and maintained by the innumerable Persian cavalry, till it was broken up by a greater horseman than they, the invincible tamer of Bucephalus? Shall we tell how in the most palmy state of Rome the title "horseman" was one of high honour and esteem, alike in peace and war? and how the uninterrupted spread of Roman power was stemmed at one point only, where it encountered the never-conquered Parthians-those fatal horsemen, fiery in advance, deadly in fight? Shall we recount the prowess of Arabs and Moors, by whose cavalry alone a new religion was carried to the ends of the earth, till the flower of mounted Christendom at Tours met and broke the overwhelming torrent? Need we speak of the days of chivalry (the very name expressive of the glories of horsemanship), when mastery lay ever with him who could bring into the field the greatest number of heavy armed knights, before whose tremendous onset pikemen and archers went down as grass before the mower? Or, passing by all other instances, need we now to be reminded that when, first since the time of Charlemagne, Europe fell under the yoke of a conqueror, was before a nation of horsemen in the Cossack steppes, and a nation of horsemen in the plains of Spain, that his star first paled? And when at length Cossack and English themselves met in combat, with whom did the final victory rest but with those whose heavy cavalry at Balaklava rode through the opposing squadrons as if it had been a line of paper.

These were in the first instance no doubt borrowed from the Etruscans, as was also the ceremony of the triumph with which they were ultimately associated. At first they seem rather to have been used as festal entrances to the great public roads, whose construction was considered as one of the most important benefits a ruler could confer on his country. There was one erected at Rimini in honour of an important restoration of the Flaminian Way by Augustus; another at Susa in Piedmont, to commemorate a similar act of the same Emperor.

Trajan built one on the pier at Ancona, when he restored that harbour, and another at Beneventum, when he repaired the Via Appia, represented in the woodcut here given. It is one of the best preserved as well as the most graceful of its class in Italy. The arch of the Sergii at Pola in Istria seems also to have been erected for a like purpose. That of Hadrian at Athens, and another built by him at Antinoë in Egypt, were monuments merely commemorative of the benefits which he had conferred on those cities by the architectural works he had erected within their walls. By far the most important application of these gateways, in Rome at least, was to commemorate a triumph which may have passed along the road over which the arch was erected beforehand for the triumphal procession to pass through, of which it would remain a memorial.