more and more developed, wars, it is probable, will become less and less frequent, and finally altogether cease. It is to this that reason points, and for this, may I not say, that reason was given to us!

WINE.

OOD wine is a good familiar creature, if it

it be well used!"

customed to say, is

says Shakspeare. Yes, "if

Here, as the lawyers are ac

"the whole case in a nutshell." Wine is indeed like a cat; you may play with it a thousand times, and yet get scratched at last. But beyond this, it will not do to disparage good tipple. Many men would never know what it is to have a magnanimous feeling were it not that they occasionally drink enough to escape from their habitual narrowness. Like Parnell's Miser

"Conscious of wanting worth, they taste the bowl,
And feel compassion touch the grateful soul.”

Indeed, stimulants are necessary. Nature craves them, and who shall resist her decrees?*

The

* The use of wine is founded principally upon an idea - the idea that it inspires. If we drank merely to gratify our appetites, or to stimulate our senses, temperance reforms, to the fullest extent ever proposed, might possibly become univer.

question of greatest importance in regard to the use of stimulants is as to the kind and quantity best to be taken. Sometimes a favorite author, at other times only a favorite wine will give the needed fillip to the spirits. For my own part, I like them both. Inspiration from Shakspeare, and a bottle of Catawba, are alike acceptable.

A man may even be known by the drinks he prefers. Chaste men love the light, still wines; wits and roysterers, sparkling wines; heavy men, high wines; and coarse men, malt and spirituous liquors.*

sal and permanent, but there is this insuperable difficulty in the case, that we drink to think, to stimulate a torpid or jaded brain, to become good company, hoping to find in our tipple what Charles Lamb calls "a solvent of speech," to waken a higher interior life, and to be lifted out of the actual into the ideal. Besides, Nature gives us no appetites that are not, in a reasonable degree, to be gratified. The very penalties imposed for excesses in their gratification imply this. "In vino" there is not only "veritas" but sensibility. It makes the face of him who uses it to excess blush for his habits. Like Dryden's Bacchus

WISHES.

NOUGH of resolution should accompany

ENOU

our wishes to make them take the form of determinations-enough of sagacity to direct them to the practicable. It is a waste of heart and brain to wish for the unattainable.

The wishes afford an indication of the character. The fame of Henry the Fourth of France chiefly rests upon his wish that he might put a fowl into the pot of every peasant in his realm; and, certainly, the character of Burns never appears so amiable as when he tells us

"E'en then a wish, mind its power,

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast,

That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some useful plan or book might make,
Or sing a sang at least."

WIT AND HUMOR.

Was correct in us his

E take life too seriously: the office of wit

is to correct in us this tendency. By

provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to

the sum of happiness as the gravest of philosophers. Wit is to discourse what suavity is to manners it lends a charm to intercourse, and a grace to speech; it banishes ennui, and enlivens society. It even dispels care. What distressed author, for instance, but forgets his straitened circumstances in laughing at that proposed motto of Sydney Smith for the "Edinburgh Review"-" Tenui Musam meditamur avena "We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal?"

Humor, without the element of refinement blended with it, runs to burlesque; with the addition of grace, it becomes wit.

Burlesque Humor - By common consent of the refined, burlesque humor is interdicted as low. Ladies, a significant circumstance, seldom indulge in it. They even compromise their claims to refinement by laughing at it. I refer more particularly to that species of humor which consists in linking the forms of heroic speech to trivial objects or familiar facts, of which the following may be taken as examples:

One more blow, and Coney Island 's free!

These sallies of mock heroism, it may be, are ludicrous enough, but still, the spirit that delights in such sallies is akin to that of the scoffer. There is not enough of the heroic in the world to make it worth while to jeer at it.

Wit and Dignity — The wit must disclaim relationship to the jester to be respected. Else, we may love the man we laugh with, but not to the point of veneration. Dignity is the inseparable accompaniment of all high ideals.

Wit and Good-Nature· Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat. When Mrs. Siddons knelt to implore her father's pardon, for having married contrary to his wishes, he was