man-all these creatures I speak of are so-called gentlemen-which shall not demand anything above the first rudiments of knowledge; which shall neither exact early rising nor late retiring; which can be fulfilled in any easy morning hour, or, if left undone, will entail no evil results; and above all, which shall be well paid. I ask proudly, is it not a triumph to our age that such a career exists, and that hundreds, I might say thousands, are now deriving from it means of ease and enjoyment, who, but for it, would have been in hopeless indigence and want?

In this age, too, of pestilent examination and inquiry, in which the humblest occupation must be approached through a fellowship course, what a blessing to think there is a career that asks no test, for which there is neither fitness nor unfitness, and whose followers stand on an equality that even angels might envy!

You are impatient to know what I allude to, and I will not torture your eagerness. If, then, there be of your family one too ignorant for a profession, too indolent for commerce, too old for the army or navy, hopelessly incapable of every effort for himself, and drearily disposed to lie down on others, with a vague idea that he has a vested right to smoke, lie a-bed, wear lackered boots, and have his hair dressed daily by a barber-if, I say, it be your privilege to include a creature of this order in the family censusreturn, make him a Director. Director of what you ask. Director of a company-a joint-stock company with a capital of two millions sterling, paid up-whatever you like. It shall be Zinc, Slates, Sardinian cotton bonds, a Discount bank at Timbuctoo, or Refrigerators for Lancaster Sound. It shall have its offices in Cannon Street, and a great City capitalist its banker. Two guineas a-day-five when the Board meets cab-hire, luncheon, the morning papers, a roaring fire, and a rather jocular style of conversa

tion over the shareholders and their aspirations, are the rewards of office. Can you picture to your mind an easier existence than this? Time was that every indolent man wished to be a bishop; but a bishop is not what he used to be. A bishop is now badgered and baited by all around him. His dean inclines to painted glass, and the archdeacon would shy a stone at it; and there is a thin-faced vicar who writes weekly for advice and guidance, and has grave doubts about the interpretation of a passage in Joshua. I tell you the bishop has other trials as well as Mrs Proudy. But the Director-the Director before whom the green door with the oval pane sways noiselessly, while the gorgeous porter, whose very gold lace hints a dividend, bows obsequiously as he throws wide another portal-is indeed a great man.

To stand back to the fire, and talk thousands and tens of thousands; to glance over the balancesheet, and sign your name after six or seven figures in a row, as though your autograph had some virtue in it; to listen to that slang of the share markets that has a clink of money in its jingle, and hear of gigantic "Operations" with overwhelming profits; and then to sit down to your basin of turtle and fried fin, with a pint of madeira, are not mere material enjoyments, but soar to the height of noble emotions, in which the individual feels himself an honour to humanity and a benefactor to his species.

To employ the simple language of a report now before me, I would say "the institution now supports above eight thousand persons who, but for its timely succour, would be not only in a state of utter pauperism and destitution, but from their previous habits and well-known tendencies positively perilous to peaceful citizens. Besides those permanently on the books of the society are a large number who have received occasional aid, and who may be said to

have been rescued by the institution from the paths of vice and debasement."

To this touching appeal, which I have copied almost literally from

the advertisement of another Magdalen, I will not add one word; but I fervently hope we shall hear no more of Destitution, now that we have got Direction.

an

I read in the journals that " officer of rank" at Vienna has bequeathed the whole of his fortune to his nephew, on the condition that "he should never read a newspaper."

I believe our English law strictly prevents any testator from imposing an immoral condition on his heir; and I therefore am strongly disposed to think that such a bequest as this I have quoted should not be considered as binding.

Had the "officer of rank" declared by his last will that his nephew, in order to inherit, should be blinded or deprived of his hearing, he could not have more egregiously violated every sentiment of right feeling than by this cruel edict. In fact, he would virtually consign his unhappy heir to both of these calamities together.

Now, it may be fair enough to tolerate the eccentricities of the living man. It is not impossible that in his character there may be many traits which will compensate for all his oddities. The whim or caprice he may ride as his hobby may not indispose him to generous actions or kindly sentiments; and we may, besides, always indulge the hope that, with a wider experience of the world and its ways, he may live to get over the delusions which once haunted him, and act and behave like his fellows.

Death, however, excludes this charitable hope, and I think it very questionable policy to give the character of permanence to what every consideration of sound sense or true physiology would regard as an abnormal and mere passing condition.

That the man who made such a

will as this was insane, I will not say; but I unhesitatingly declare that he imposed a condition repugnant to good sense, and totally opposed to every consideration of reason and judgment. First of all, he assumed-and of all tyrannies ĺ know of none greater-to dictate to another, for the whole term of his life, a condition of moral blindness. Secondly, he presumed to judge not alone what all newspapers were in all lands, but what they might be in years long after his death.

That any man about to leave the world should like to declare to it before he went, "I have no sympathy with you; I don't care for you-for your wars, your struggles for liberty, your sufferings, or your triumphs. Nothing to me whether you be rich or poor, in sickness or in health; whether your homes be happy, or your fields be desolate; whether the crimes of your people decrease, or that new forms of vice call for new modes of repression. I don't want to know if education be spreading through your land, or to hear what results have followed such enlightenment. I am alike indifferent to the nature of your laws, and the mode in which they are administered. Uninterested in the great changes which affect States, I do not ask to be informed what the world thinks of them; of that public opinion which is the record of what condition humanity stands in at a given era, I have no desire to hear. Enclosed in the shell of my selfishness, I am satisfied to lead the life of an oyster. I compound for mere existence, and no more."

Now, I ask, is it such a nature as this that should be permitted

to make a formal bequest of his bigotry and ignorance? Should the law lend itself to ratify a compact whereby this man's crass stupidity shall be perpetuated?

I am aware he was a German; and much may be forgiven him on the score of narrowness. I know, too, that his warning applied peculiarly to the journals of his own land. And it is but fair to own that a German "Blatt" is about the dreariest reading a man can fall upon. The torrent of rubbishy phraseology in which this beer-bemuddled people involve their commonest thoughts-the struggles they make at subtle distinctions through the mazes of their foggy intellects the perpetual effort to regard everything under some fifteen or fiveand-twenty different aspects, belabouring a theme, and kneading it as a baker kneads his dough-make up a mass of entanglement and confusion that would drive a practical energetic people to the verge of distraction.

That a man should interdict such readings as these is no more strange than that he should forbid the use of some besotting narcotic, dreary in its effects and depressing in its consequences. Perhaps this testator had recognised in his own case some of the dire results of this dyspeptic literature. Still, with all its faults, its story was the world. It spoke of man in his works and ways with other men, how he bought and sold, made peace or war, built up or threw down; of the virtues he held high, of the vices he reprobated; what were the views he extended to the world at large, and what were the hopes that he cherished for those who were to come after him. Even through the labyrinth of German involution glimpses of these might be had; and why should not his heir be permitted to look at life, albeit through the smoked glass of his native language?

One of our most brilliant essayists, and most accomplished think

ers, has declared that he regards a number of the Times' as the last report of what the world has achieved of progress; and I thoroughly agree with him. That broadsheet is the morning's "return" of Humanity, not alone recounting what it has accomplished in the preceding twenty-four hours, but how it feels after it. You have not alone the bulletin of the great battle the world is fighting, but you have an authentic report of the effective state of humanity on the next morning.

Take the most thorough man of the world of your acquaintancethe man most perfectly versed in what goes on in life, not in one class or section of society, but throughout all ranks and conditions of men-who knows where and for what the world is fighting in this quarter or in that-how it builds its ships-what it pays for goldhow it tills its fields, smelts its metals, cooks its food, and writes its novels-and I ask you, what would he be without his newspaper? By what possible machinery could he learn, as he sits at his breakfast, the last news from Shanghai, and the last ballet at Paris-the state of the funds at San Francisco-the winner at Newmarket-the pantomime at the Olympic-the encyclical of the Pope? Do not reply to me with a Cui bono?

For I say that it is with the actual passing, daily-arising incidents of life a man ought to be thoroughly acquainted, bringing to their consideration all the aid his reading and reflection can supply, so that he neither fall into a dogged incredulity on one side, or a fatal facility of belief on the other. In an age so wildly speculative as the present-eager to inquire, and not over given to scruple-such men as these are invaluable to society, and a whole corps of college professors would be less effective in dispelling error or asserting truth than these people trained in all the dialectics of the daily press.

If the testator, in the case before us-for I return to him now-was simply moved by a desire to conceal from his heir the late events occurring in Germany, I own a plea might without great difficulty be advanced in his behalf. It would be hard to condemn him if he wished to shroud in obscurity the ignominious subserviency of Austria, and the insolent pretension of her ancient rival Prussia. The lamentable part assigned to the Empire in this Danish conflict might well suggest to an officer in the Imperial service such an intention. Austrian wars have not been remarkable for success, but they have always been distinguished for the splendid valour of the troops, and the noble devotion of men who, however worsted, never regarded defeat as overthrow. In the terrible battles of the first Empire, this character of their courage displayed itself on every field. So also was it conspicuous in the last Lombard campaign. What an indignity, then, for such soldiers to be arrayed against the greatly inferior numbers of a nation unused to war-to a brave handful of men ready to sell their lives rather than surrender their native soil to the foot of the invader! The white-coated legions of the Empire had no need to inscribe Duppel or the Danewerke on their ensigns. And what inglorious companionship was that in which they found themselves! Dupes of M. Bismarck! I am not in the least surprised that an Austrian officer might desire to obliterate any memory of these things; but it is not so easily done. A codicil enjoining the condition that his heir should become a Trappist might possibly succeed; I know of nothing else.

I have to speak with diffidence as to how I should feel in any new or untried situation in life: I cannot, therefore, say what my feelings might be if I were to awake and discover that somebody had bequeathed to me something. I can

no more answer for my conduct, than could the gentleman on being asked what he should do if he met a white bear. But so far as I can understand my own nature, I should reject a legacy coupled with such a condition as this. Without my newspaper, life would narrow itself to the small limits of my personal experiences, and humanity be compressed into the ten or fifteen people I mix with. Now I refuse to accept this. I have not a sixpence in consols, but I want to know how they stand. I was never-I never in all likelihood shall be-in Japan; but I have an intense curiosity to know what our troops did at Yokohama. I deplore the people who suffered by that railroad smash; and I sympathise with the newly-married couple so beautifully depicted in the Illustrated,' as they drove off in a chaise and four, the bald old gent at the hall door waving them a last adieu. I like the letters of the correspondents, with their little grievances about unpunctual trains, or some unwarrantable omissions in the Liturgy. I even like the people who chronicle the rainfall, and record little facts about the mildness of the season.

As for the advertisements, I regard them as the glass and mirror of the age. Show me but one page of the "Wants" of any country, and I engage myself to give a sketch of the current civilisation of the period. What glimpses of rare interiors do we gain by these brief paragraphs! How full of suggestiveness and of story are they! Think of the social circle at Clapham that advertise for a lodger who has a good tenor voice, and would appreciate the domestic life of a retired family devoted to music and the fine arts! Imagine the more exalted propriety of those who want "a footman in a serious family, where there are means of grace, and a kitchen-maid kept"! Here it is a shooting-box to be disposed of; here a widow in affluent circum

stances announces her intention to re-marry; here a scientific naturalist professes his readiness to exchange bugs or caterpillars with another devotee; and here a more practical physiologist wants from three to four dozen lively rats for his bull-terrier. Are not these lifeetchings? Do you want anything more plain or palpable to tell you where and how we live ?

Now, I neither want shooting box, beetles, rats, or widow, but I am not to be cut off from my sympathies with the people who do. On the contrary, in the very proportion that all these things do not enter into my requirements, do I desire to know who and what are the people who need them, why they need them, and what they do with them when they get them.

If,

Perhaps my nature may have its excess of this fellow-feeling-I cannot say; but I know I'd give more than I should like to say to be able to pass an evening with the musical circle, or even to have the privilege of a few sweet moments with the serious family. I am human to the very tips of my fingers, and there is not a mood in humanity without its interest for me. therefore, some admirer of these O'Dowderies, on learning that I am not a sleeping partner in Baring's, or a large shareholder in the Great Western, should desire to express his satisfaction in a testamentary form, let him not couple his bequest with such a condition as I have recorded. I may possibly be able to "rub on" without my legacy, but I couldn't exist without my 'Times.'

THERE has always been an immense amount of moralising about dress, but much of it does not at all go to the root of the matter. A stern conventional view of the subject has evidently suited the preacher best, who, assuming vanity to be universal, has preferred to found his arguments on the excesses of vanity, rather than to enter upon the niceties of the question, and listen to what another side may have to say; and philosophers, piquing themselves on pure reason, have treated the subject as simply despicable: the man is everything, the clothes he wears are absolutely nothing-things with which he has no real relation, which hang on him till they drop off or are exchanged for others, without establishing any real connection, possessing any influence, or affecting him any more than the table-cloth the table which it covers. Now, in fact, since the first garment of all, clothes have been knowledge, influence, and expression, and house and home to the wearer. They

have taught him his first conscious idea; they were his first link with this outer scene; they first made him realise that he was a personage in the world of vaguely apprehended forms, of which his unpractised senses partially informed him. A life without clothes, not to mention its other inconveniencies, would, we verily believe, be a life without thought. Deep and fanciful minds have speculated on existence, and how they can arrive at the certainty of it in their own person; but they would never have attained to the power of constructing theories, working out problems, reasoning upon their being at all, but for the cultivating, educating, convincing instruction and logic of their clothes. It is fundamentally unreasonable, and a mistake, in a sculptor of any age to represent a philosopher as even partially undraped. "I think, therefore I am," is the conclusion of adult reason; the baby has leapt to a similar conclusion forty years sooner-"I have shoes and a red sash, therefore I