* * * * * The idea of good or bad fortune attending a man, has been generally received in all ages. Cicero recommended Pompey to the Romans for their general, as he was a man of good fortune; and Cardinal Mazarin, when any officer was recommended to him, always asked, “Est il heureux?” * * * * * We never regard innovation, or even oppression, till it comes home to ourselves. In the life of Cromwell, an anecdote is told of a clerk in chancery, who had seen with great indifference all the alterations that had been made in the constitution both in church and state; but when he was told there was to be some new regulations in the sex’ clerk’s office—Nay, says he, if they begin once to strike out _fundamentals_, there is no telling where they will stop. * * * * * Public opinion is a tyrant—cruel are the sacrifices it demands. * * * * * How many fathers there are who always comfort themselves with saying, “I shall die poor, but let my sons make their way in the world as I have done!” To which some complaisant neighbor replies, “And I am sure, sir, they cannot do better!” But should not parents reflect that their sons have not only the same difficulties to encounter which they have had, but the additional disadvantage, that having been brought up in habits of luxury and idleness, to which the parents themselves in their youth were strangers. * * * * * Married people sometimes study to appear as fond as lovers, passing their time in billing and cooing like turtle doves. Let them remember that bankrupts in love, like those in fortune, appear in gaudy colors, to keep up their credit. * * * * * A deaf and dumb person being asked what is forgiveness, took out his pencil and wrote the answer to the written question thus: “It is the odor which flowers yield when trampled upon.” What a volume of exquisite poetry and at the same time forcible truth is contained in it. * * * * * I remember somewhere to have read of a tyrannical ruler, who is said to have publicly erected altars to cruelty and injustice. Many modern worshipers of the same hideous divinities are equally as zealous as this tyrant: but with the essential difference, that their altars are erected in private, within the penetralia of their own homes. Like the Egyptian priesthood, after having performed the most diabolical rites, they come forth arrayed in the white robes of innocence. And society is too apt, like the “ignobile vulgus” of Egypt, to greet them with the same reverence they did their priesthood. They, too, have their esoteric and exoteric theology—the one is their religion in private, the other abroad. * * * * *