There is a great difference in the sensitiveness of authors to criticism. Sir Walter Scott passed thirteen years without reading what the critics or reviewers said of his writings; while Byron was sensitive to an excess about what was said of him. It was the reviewers who stung him into his first work of genius--_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. Racine was very sensitive to criticism; and poor Keats was "snuffed out by an article." Moliere was thrown into a great rage when his plays were badly acted. One day, after _Tartuffe_ had been played, an actor found him stamping about as if mad, and beating his head, crying--"Ah! dog! Ah! butcher!" On being asked what was the matter, he replied--"Don't be surprised at my emotion! I have just been seeing an actor falsely and execrably declaiming my piece; and I can not see my children maltreated in this horrid way, without suffering the tortures of the damned!" The first time Voltaire's _Artemise_ was played, it was _hissed_. Voltaire, indignant, sprang to his feet in his box, and addressed the audience! At another time, at Lausanne, where an actress seemed fully to apprehend his meaning, he rushed upon the stage and embraced her knees! A great deal might be said about the first failures of authors and orators. Demosthenes stammered, and was almost inaudible, when he first tried to speak before Philip. He seemed like a man moribund. Other orators have broken down, like Demosthenes, in their first effort. Curran tried to speak, for the first time, at a meeting of the Irish Historical Society; but the words died on his lips, and he sat down amid titters--an individual present characterizing him as _orator Mum_. Boileau broke down as an advocate, and so did Cowper, the poet. Montesquieu and Bentham were also failures in the same profession, but mainly through disgust with it. Addison, when a member of the House of Commons, once rose to speak, but he could not overcome his diffidence, and ever after remained silent. OSTRICHES. HOW THEY ARE HUNTED. The family of birds, of which the ostrich forms the leading type, is remarkable for the wide dispersion of its various members; the ostrich itself spreads over nearly the whole of the burning deserts of Africa--the Cassowary represents it amid the luxuriant vegetation of the Indian Archipelago. The Dinornis, chief of birds, formerly towered among the ferns of New Zealand, where the small Apteryx now holds its place; and the huge Æpyornis strode along the forests of Madagascar. The Emu is confined to the great Australian continent, and the Rhea to the southern extremity of the western hemisphere; while nearer home we find the class represented by the Bustard, which, until within a few years, still lingered upon the least frequented downs and plains of England.