GRADATIONS IN DRINKING.

A vine bears three grapes, the first of pleasure, the second of drunkenness, and the third of repentance. Anacharsis.

TRUE AND FALSE HUMOUR.

I have set down at length the genealogical table of False Humour, and at the same time place beside it the genealogy of True Humour, that the reader may at one view behold their different pedigrees and relations—

Read not to contradict and confute, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention.

Басоп.

THE PROSE WORKS OF MILTON.

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should in our time be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the "Paradise Lost" has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, "a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies." Macaulay.

CRUEL JESTING.

Wit loses its respect with the good when seen in company with malice; and to smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief.

Sheridan.

HANGERS-ON

He who dangles after the great is the last at table, and the first to be cuffed.

LAUGHTER.

Italian Proverb.

Laughter is a most healthful exertion; it is one of the greatest helps to digestion with which I am acquainted; and the custom prevalent among our forefathers, of exciting it at table by jesters and buffoons, was founded on true medical principles. Hufeland.

UNEXERTED GENIUS.

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

LITERARY DINNERS.

Beecher.

I knew a person who occasionally gave entertainments to authors. His fancy-was to place them at table, each according to the size and thickness of the volumes they had published, commencing with the folio authors, and proceeding through the quarto and octavo, down to the duodecimo, each according to his rank.

Menage.

HOW TO DISCOMFIT A PUNSTER.

Pretend to be deaf; and after he has committed his pun, and just before he expects people to laugh at it, beg his pardon, and request him to repeat it again. After you have made him do this three times, say, Oh, that is a pun, I believe!" I never knew a punster venture a third exhibition under similar treatment. It requires a little nicety so as to make him repeat it in proper time. If well done, the company laugh at the punster, and then he is ruined for Maginn.

ever.

EXCESS IN RECREATION INJURIOUS.

He that spends his time in sports, and calls it recreation, is like him whose garment is all made of fringes, and his meat nothing but sauces: they are healthless, chargeable, and useless. Jeremy Taylor.

A BUMPER.

When the English were good Catholics, they usually drank the Pope's health in a full glass every day after dinner-au bon père: whence your word bumper.

Cocchi.

EVIL INFLUENCE OF CUSTOM.

Custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes. Montaigne.

EXTREMES MEET.

So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.

SPITE.

Charles Lamb.

Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords as any polysyllable in the language. Dickens.