The foregoing happy English rendering of the French maxim we borrow from Mr. Henry Attwell, who has published a selection of Joubert's _pensees_ translated, the translation being accompanied with the original text. Children have more need of patterns than of critics. Children should be made reasonable, but they should not be made reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey and unreasonable for them to dispute. Without that, education would waste itself in bandying arguments, and every thing would be lost if all teachers were not clever cavillers. In a poem there should be not only poetry of images, but poetry of ideas. Words, like lenses, darken whatever they do not help us see. Buffon says that genius is but the aptitude for being patient. The aptitude for a long-continued and unwearying effort of attention is indeed, the genius of observation; but there is another genius, that of invention, which is aptitude for a quick, prompt, and ever-active energy of penetration. Buffon's is a good working definition, to say the least--for genius of any sort. The end of a production should always call to mind its beginning. This may be compared to the law in musical composition requiring that a piece end in the key in which it began. Taste is the literary conscience of the soul. "Artistic," instead of "literary," Joubert might have widened his "thought" by saying. When there is born in a nation a man capable of producing a great thought, another is born there capable of understanding it and of admiring it. That which astonishes, astonishes once; but that which is admirable is more and more admired. Fully to understand a great and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it. A few individual literary judgments now, and we shall have shown from Joubert all that our room will admit: Seek in Plato forms and ideas only. These are what he himself sought. There is in him more light to see by than objects to see, more form than substance. We should breathe him and not feed on him. Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From these different destinations of their works, there could not but spring a multitude of differences in their style. Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a stylus of bronze. In Plato the spirit of poetry gives life to the languors of dialectics. Plato loses himself in the void; but one sees the play of his wings; one hears the noise of their motion. Cicero is, in philosophy, a kind of moon. His teaching sheds a light, very soft, but borrowed, a light altogether Greek, which the Roman has softened and enfeebled.