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54 THE GATHERER.

tin's Little Summer." To this Shakspeare alludes in the first part of King Henry the Fourth, (Act 1, Scene 2), where Prince Henry says to Falstaff, " Farewell, thou latter spring! farewell, All-hallowen summer!" And in the first part of King Henry the Sixth, (Act 1, Scene 2) , Joan La Pucelle says, "Assign'd am I to be the English scourge "This night the siege assuredly I'll raise: "Expect St. Martin's Summer, halcyon days," " Since I have entered into these wars." A FURIOUS wife, like a musket, may do a great deal of execution in her house, but then she makes a great noise in it at the same time. A mild wife, will, like an air-gun, act with as much power without being heard.

STRAWBERRIES.-One of the most remarkable examples of the power of the human body in the endurance of great and continued fatigue, is shown by the strawberry women of England, who, during the season, carry a heavy basket on their head twice daily from Twickenham to Covent Garden, walking upwards of forty miles. Fatigue like this would soon destroy a horse; but these women, who come purposely from Wales and the collieries, endure the labour for weeks without injury or complaint.

THE London Literary Gazette states that the two gold medals, given by the King and annually awarded by the Royal Society of Literature, have this year been given to Hallam, and Washington Irving.

WIT AND HUMOUR.-Wit is abstract and refined: it resembles a delineation of Nature in some of her eternal forms, recognized in every age. Humour is more conventional ; it is an emblem of the fleeting fashions of the day.

LOSING CASTE.-That class of persons to whom nature has been niggardly in the gifts of mind or body, have always the means of equalizing themselves in society; let them descend a single step inthe scale of rank, and they will be received with esteem and consideration by those below; but, alas ! how rare is the spirit that dictated the choice of the Roman, (first in a village, rather than second at Rome;) these slighted people, who seem to be fashioned in mind and person for the foils or appendages of society, live in contented inferiority, and regard forfeiture of caste as the only mortal disgrace.

EGOTISM. The fanciful, the boundless egotism of genius flows from the same obscure principle that inspires the insipid garrulity of the unlettered, superannuated valetudinarian who forever prates of his diseaso. It is an inherent propensity, ripened to an unwonted exuberance by the prevailing fashions of the day-for how little is known of the secret emotions that thrilled the bosoms of Pope and his contemporaries? But to the wits of the present era a Boswell were a superfluous appendage-the moralist will perhaps derive new lights from this universal confidence.

CHRISTIANITY.- Pure and genuine Christianity never was, and never can be, the National Religion of any country upon earth. It is a gold, too refined to be worked up with any human institution without a large portion of alloy-for no sooner is this small grain of mustard seed watered with the fertile showers of civil emoluments, than it grows up into a large and spreading tree, under the shelter of whose branches the birds of prey and plunder will not fail to make for themselves comfortable habitations, and thence deface its beauty and destroy its fruits.Soame Jennings.

EARLY RISING.—-There is, or should be, a belief that it will insure a good complexion, to wash the face in May-dew; for, if the dew should fail to give a bloom, the early rising will add something attractive to beauty itself. A wise physician to a foolish prince recommended that his patient should play a daily game with a medicated ball, the influence of which, he pretended would be imbibed through the palm of the hands. This was only a pretence to make the great man exercise; but the prescription was successful. The same certainty will attend the washing in May-dew.

FRIENDSHIP. WHEN friendship is altogether an affair of taste, and founded on the airy basis of caprice, it resembles the craving felt for peculiar fruits, flowers, or beautiful toys ; this species of friendship springs from the refinement of independence or the recklessness of obscure poverty; the struggling aspirant for consequence finds it too unprofitable to meet his views, he requires a more solid foundation-but the common friendship of the world goes for something, and its bonds should not for trifling perfidies be severed; this error of sensibility is too common in early youth, where the self-love of one party, wounded bythe self-love and self-interestof another, recoils as though appalled by discoveries hateful and horrid, and vehemently renounces all social tiesbut what a dream is life without society or extended interests.

LOSS OF BEAUTY. THE world affects to commiserate the wounds of the heart, and to disregard those of vanity:What a division of ideas is here produced by two phrases, that are in reality synonimous. With what superficial frivolity the loss of beauty is treated by authors of great merit in other respects, and also in those gossipping conversations in actual life which mean nothing; and yet, to the individual, how immense is that loss-what consequences it involves !-often glory, honour, respect, consideration, esteem, power, love, extinction of influence either for good or evil; it strikes at all the moral part of being, and if these are not wounds of the heart, what are? Circumstances or dispositions sometimes render beauty a thing indifferent to its possessor; but often it is so identified with being, as to make the destiny of the individual, and its destruction un-