as the shadow is oftentimes the finest part of a picture. When man, woman, or boy, works well, and does well, it is as unwise as it is cruel to withhold what a poet calls 'the cheerful meed of praise.' It is meed, because it is due reward; and some natures hunger for it. All quickly perceptive and feminine natures-all who are authors, artists, fine workmen-love it. There is nothing so stimulating as honest, judicious, righteous approval; and may be that in Heaven even we shall hear it.

it

But praise and blame must be freely accorded to make either efficacious. The plain speaker, who is always 'telling his mind,' has generally a very unpleasant mind to tell. He alone is wise who holds his tongue till the right time; who waits till conscience has done its work, and self-approval has bestowed its silent reward. There is a famous old quotation from a capital old comedy which will fitly close this essay: 'Approbation,' says one of the characters with a grateful bow, 'approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed.' Sir Hubert Stanley's character is given in the phrase. He was no flatterer; no snarling plain-speaker; but a gentleman of honour and of judgment; free to blame when necessary; equally ready to praise when praise was due. From such men a few gracious words are indeed precious; from a flatterer they are worse than worthless: they are poison.

PEACE AND WAR.

The Cost of a Conqueror-Life sometimes well lost-London
Dangers-Firemen - Conquest a Fertilising Influence-Deaths
along the Coast London Mortality-The Sword of Gold-
Worse than War-England at War The Cankers of Peace.

NE of our best modern historians has lately treated us to one of those pleasant literary games which amuse as well as instruct, but which are, after all, not thoroughly satis

factory. The gentleman writes upon the 'Cost of Napoleon.' He might as well term his article the Cost of Ambition, or of War in Modern Times, or the partial cost, for no one can tell us the whole cost and the whole truth. He presumes, then, let us say, that Napoleon the Great-if indeed, in consolidating constitutional liberty in France, the present Napoleon may not prove to be much the greater of the two-cost France about one million of

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human lives and five millions of money.

That estimate
Napoleon cost

appears to us to be very modest indeed.
us-the British nation-at a moderate calculation, four
hundred millions of money; and how many men, Heaven
only knows. We, in what we term the Abyssinian war,
that military promenade into the interior of Africa, for
which we are to pay the enormous sum of twelve mil-
lions, killed King Theodore, and luckily lost not a man;
but the Crimean war cost us an immense number of
lives and two hundred millions of pounds. Is this
dreadful? We do not think it is. The old song, 'Go
patter to lubbers,' is in true sailor fashion, and is good
philosophy. It tells us that a sailor's life is intended to
be thrown away, and that the right end of life is some-
times losing it. Visiting a Fire Station' one day,
we marked the great happiness, self-respect, and cleanli-
ness of the men and their wives—how cheerful they were,
and how ennobled they seemed to be by their calling.
These men, perhaps, do not earn much, but every half-
penny they earn they enjoy. There was the cosy little
room for man and wife, little kitchen, pantry, all tidy and
pleasant; there the warm, good clean bed, from which
A. B. must be ready to jump up at any moment, to go
and die a most dreadful death; there the wife lies alone,
knowing that her husband has gone out with his life in
his hand, and may at any time be brought back a black-
ened corpse, if at all. In thirty-three years we have had