respectable people, is the anguish of being found out, and the too late conviction that honesty is never a losing game in the end. (14.)" JACK WILL NEVER MAKE A GENTLEMAN." THIS proverb had its origin in illiberality and prejudice. There is still enough of these in the world to ensure it popularity, and recommend it to posterity, as antiquity recommended it to us. Until Jack becomes a gentleman, in spite of proverbial predictions, he must never expect to have his capacity for becoming one admitted. While he is down, the idea of his rising is deemed sheer insanity; while he is rising, his progress is voted to be too ridiculous; when he is up, and Jack is styled Squre John, he is by universal consent a gentleman; but the proverb remains in full force and effect nevertheless, and the notion that the fig, gentleman, may be gathered from the thistle, Jack, is scouted as before. Napoleon was, at one time," but a little corporal;" and, to descend from the real to the mimic scene, Mr. Kean was once the drudge of pantomime and burlesque. But the little corporal made no insignificant sort of monarch, as times go, and the harlequin was thought to play some of the heroes of tragedy in grand style. Why should not Jacks here and there become gentlemen, after this? Sir Humphry Davy, though he had been born with less genius for inquiry, might have equally exhibited the gentle spirit of a philosopher in an humble station; Sir Stamford Raffles, though he had never travelled a mile from Leadenhallstreet, must, as a mere scribe with a pen behind his ear, have been the most kindly and courteous of mortals; and Sir Thomas Lawrence, though he had drawn nothing but ale and cider in the hostelry of his sire all his days, might have had an instinct of courtliness, and a native taste for the polite. These instances are cited, not as the most striking, or rare, but simply as among the most recent, and the first that come to mind. Nine-tenths of the books that have ever been written contain histories of similar transformations, without the least pretension to magic or miracles. Half the carriages that drive by at the present day contain living examples of the same principle of transmutation-Jack into gentleman. But as Mrs. Hannah More says, It is as vain to tell men they will never be this or that, as to tell the grub it will never be a gorgeous fly, and wanton in the idle summer air. But there must be a beginning, an opportunity. Jack must get a start. The mere desire, common to all the world, of bettering our condition, is not enough; there must be superior energy, or a fortunate chance, to conduct the adventurer into the right track. If the kind fairy come not, whether she be called genius, or good luck, or bear both names, as most commonly happens, the gourd will never be turned into a carriage of gold. And then there are so many who fall short by a mere hair'sbreadth of the desired point-so many little feet that cannot quite get the glass slipper on! But, for all this, we may not repress effort, nor pronounce a verdict against the capacity to rise before it has had its chance. It is astonishing what rough and ugly pebbles polish up into sparklers, making the gazer cry out, "Did you ever! I shouldn't have guessed that to be a diamond." As of all the little dunces in an infant school, you could not pick out the dullest, and decide to a dead certainty that he would not turn out a genius in the money-market, or a dab at metaphysics; so you could not with greater safety predict that the little scrubby rascallion playing at leapfrog in a London gutter will not hereafter be a fine gentleman, and figure at St. James's. The world is full of genius, of some kind or other; its possessors want only that invaluable adjunct, the art of knowing how to use it. Search the simple annals of the poor-look around in the unlikeliest places, and judge by comparison, and circumstance; in every nook we light upon Gray's illustrious obscure "Some village Brummel, that with faultless tie Effort is damped by the chilling doctrine preached on all sides, that the low can never be other than they are-that the leopard cannot change his spots, and that Jack will be "no gentleman" to the end of his life. We admit that a pauper's brat may be born with a vast and original mind, but we do not allow that a pauper's brat can be born with a nature steeped in gentlemanliness. That is generally identified with a cultivation of the graces, with which it may coexist, but with which it has nothing essentially to do. If we fail to encourage any sign of the gentleman that may be discernible in Jack, or to recognise in him a disposition to attain some superiority over his present state, he will be pretty sure to fall hopelessly into the ranks from which he essayed to start. If with some notions of refinement he is to be cut in the circles just beyond him, he will be still worse treated in the circles to which he belongs. There he must abandon his gentilities for the sake of comfort, as the Misses Primrose did when they visited the "two Miss Flamboroughs." Jack may affect some neatness of dress and courtliness of speech, but among his familiars he will be told "it's no go." His gentlemanly taste, if a "true thing," will stand but little chance of appreciation from his neighbours. Captain Marryat, to show how the low vulgar sometimes judge of the high, tells a story of a cabman who insisted that a lady by whom he had been abused in "shocking language" was indeed a lady-" Wasn't she though? She was; a real lady-hat and feathers!" Partridge thought the man who played the king a far better actor than Garrick, who played Hamlet. Mock dignity succeeds where the real fails; and poor Jack, with the feelings of a gentleman, will be run down by the ignorant ruffianism around him, unless encouraged by the gentle to preserve them as the chief graces and blessings of life. (15.)" BEGGARS MUST NOT BE CHOOSERS," THE glorious privilege of being independent brings with it the glorious liberty of choice. It is an inestimable advantage, and yet one of the many that are rarely prized in possession, to the extent to which they are coveted beforehand. What can atone for the want of it, where it has been once enjoyed! To him who of two indulgences has always voluntarily chosen one, a sentence of perpetual restriction to that one which was his free choice, would be a sentence of deprivation of all enjoyment from it. The power of choice is every thing, even when unexercised, and when habit has prejudiced the mind in favour of what was at first preferred from caprice or accident. The consciousness that the pleasure we have is that which we choose, and that another awaits us should the sense tire, is the great element of pleasure. There is in it the freedom from all restraint, and from all poverty of means, which is the soul of enjoyment. But tell the comfortable old boy, the creature of custom, who for the last quarter of a century has spent his evening in the tavern-parlour, that for the quarter of a century that remains to him he must frequent the same tavern-parlour still, and he will pray fervently for the indulgence, which he never yet tasted, of passing his evenings at his own fireside," in the bosom of his family." He will pant after his neglected wife, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks. Tell him he must sip brandy-and-water henceforth as he has sipped it heretofore, and he will pray for a cup of poison by way of change. He may be the slave of habit if left to himself, but seek to fix the habit upon him as a necessity, and he will loathe what he most liked. He rises from a dull clod into a keen and sensitive spirit, and like the apparition conjured up by the weird sisters, he "will not be commanded." Ascend a scale higher in life, and bid the regular and unerring operagoer repeat for the rest of his life his nightly visitations to the scene which is his Elysium, and he will shrink from it as from the pit of Acheron. Thither (that is to the Opera) in all probability he would have perseveringly repaired, as often as the doors opened, and as long as two boxes held together, had his liberty continued; there, with his glass wedded to his lack-lustre eye, his soul for ever flitting between rapturous excitement and a dreamy repose, realizing neither, he might have been found years hence, in his extreme winter as in his early spring, displaying the ruling passion strong in death, but for the sudden check conveyed by the potent monosyllable "must." It was the death-knell of freedom of choice. His sweetest luxury is transformed into a hateful labour; not that he likes "My heart's my own, my will is free," (as Bob Acres singeth) better than Di tanti palpiti; not that he suddenly discovers dancing to be disagreeable, and Lablache a bore; not that there is any fear of a want of Lablaches and Taglionis so long as an opera and an aristocracy remain; but merely that the voluntary principle has been annulled, and remorseless compulsion set up in its place. Nothing that charmed him to go, could possibly charm him when he had no power to refuse. The delight he sought, would turn to a disgust if forced upon him. He likes singing, but not to the tune of "The bird in yonder cage confined;" he likes dancing, but he cannot dance in fetters. He would rather pass whole evenings at sixpenny whist, with an asthmatic aunt who has nothing to leave him, than go to hear new Malibrans and see fresh Ceritos" upon compulsion." "Always partridges," is a sentence which, so far from having any terrors to either of these creatures of habit, would be passed upon them by their own lips. They preferred partridges from the first, and on partridges they would feast continually, unless told that they could never have any thing else served up, when partridges would instantly become their favourite aversion, and thistles would be taken in preference. Yet beggars must not be choosers; and, what is more, we must, do all we can to remind them of the fact continually! The proverb means, that the miserable must put up with any thing. It is enough for the hungry that we bountifully spare them a potato, without allowing them a veto as to roasting or boiling. They must take it on our terms, or they take it not at all; this is the only sense in which we can permit them to be choosers. They can have no choice as to the terms on which they are to live, but they have always liberty to starve: "'Tis glorious thus to have our own free will." The world is all before them where to choose, yet have they no choice but this. They must take, not what they want, but what they can get; not what will do them good, but what others like to give. Their cry is, in their utmost need, for bread; and the good Samaritan proffers a blister for the relief of the chest. Beggars must not be choosers! The feet of the way worn wretch are cut and blistered; and if he casts a disappointed glance at the old rimless hat which Charity flings out to him, and wishes in his heart it were a pair of shoes, his ingratitude and presumption are shocking to the giver, and he is reminded, as the door of the benevolent closes against him, that beggars must not be choosers. He is considered to be in luck's way when he gets what is of no earthly use to him, in place of that which his wants most crave. The doctrine which asserts that the hardship of this lot is very materially diminished by the want of choice to which the sufferers under it have always been subjected, applies especially to the flaying of eels. It says in so many words that the blessing which people never had, they never want, and that the misery which they have always had, they relish exceedingly at last. The argument is, that the man who commenced life in a dungeon, and there ended it without the hope of change, passed his days as happily as the man who lived in a palace, with the choice of taking up his abode in a dungeon whenever it suited his fancy. 2 M Dec.-VOL. LX. NO. CCXL. THE reader, before proceeding to the text, will doubtless have taken a glance at the Woodcut prefixed to this article; and will, most probably, have determined that it stands for the head of a very magnificent animal. And, truly, so it does. Witness his stately antlers-a perfect "flourish of horns;" and, like an original melody, all "out of his own head." Count, too, his tines, which denote him a Stag, or Hart, rather, of the very first class. For, strangely as it may sound, the tinier such game is the better. In that favourite story amongst the Scotch Novels, the Bride of Lammermoor, it will be remembered, that Norman the Forester vouches for the woodcraft and courage of the Master of Ravenswood; who, at the age of sixteen, had rushed in and hamstrung the wild deer at bay-"a stout old Trojan of the first head, with tentined branches, and a brow as broad as e'er a bullock's." Such a buck, was of course accounted a noble one: but here we have the bust of a still more magnificent creature; the number of whose tines amountsas the German designation implies-to sixteen. What a sensation it would cause, were it rumoured that such a stag was afoot in Athol-that such a pair of antlers had been glimpsed in |