This anecdote reminds one of a certain amateur versifier whom Thomas Davidson, the ‘Scottish Probationer,’ once met with in his peregrinations, who used to read to his suffering auditor long poems of his own composition. When Davidson did violence to his conscience by praising any of them, the poetaster complacently remarked: ‘Yes, it’s capital.’ How differently puerile vanity like this affects one, from the lofty words some great writers have used of their own works. How fine, for example, is the address of Bacon: ‘Those are the Meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed _their_ interest.’ Horace, in one of his finest odes, says of himself: ‘I have erected a monument more durable than brass, and more lofty than the regal height of the pyramids.’ In a similar strain, Shakspeare writes in one of his sonnets: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this lofty rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. It would fail us to repeat all the anecdotes that might be told of the vanity of scholars. Richard Bentley, whom Macaulay calls the greatest scholar that has appeared in Europe since the revival of learning, always spoke, wrote, and acted as if he considered a great scholar the greatest of men. In the preface to his edition of Horace, he describes at some length the characteristics of the ideal critic, and pretty plainly indicates that he regarded himself as that model individual. If, in scholarship, Samuel Parr was inferior to Bentley, his vanity was at least equally colossal. ‘Shepherd,’ he once said to one of his friends, ‘the age of great scholars is past. I am the only one now remaining of that race of men.’ ‘No man’s horse carries more Latin than mine,’ he one day observed to an acquaintance with whom he was out riding. In signal contrast to the opinions these two worthies entertained of themselves was the verdict which Porson, the greatest Greek scholar England has seen, passed on himself. Being once asked why he had produced so little original matter, he replied: ‘I doubt if I could produce any original work which could command the attention of posterity. I can only be known by my notes; and I am quite satisfied if, three hundred years hence, it shall be said that one Porson lived towards the close of the eighteenth century who did a good deal for the text of Euripides.’ BURIED ALIVE.