TRUTH IN PLEASURE.--Men have been said to be sincere in their pleasures, but this is only that the tastes and habits of men are more easily discernible in pleasure than in business; the want of truth is as great a hindrance to the one as to the other. Indeed, there is so much insincerity and formality in the pleasurable department of human life, especially in social pleasures, that instead of a bloom there is a slime upon it, which deadens and corrupts the thing. One of the most comical sights to superior beings must be to see two human creatures with elaborate speech and gestures making each other exquisitely uncomfortable from civility; the one pressing what he is most anxious that the other should not accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving offense by refusal. There is an element of charity in all this too; and it will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and considerate at the same time. This will be better done by enlarging our sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us, than by increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so that we are able to do more seeming with greater skill and endurance.--_Friends in Council._ [From the Dublin University Magazine.] THE GERMAN MEISTERSINGERS--HANS SACHS. We once chanced to meet with a rare old German book which contains an accurate history of the foundation of the Meistersingers, a body which exercised so important an influence upon the literary history, not only of Germany, but of the whole European Continent, that the circumstances connected with its origin can not prove uninteresting to our readers. The burghers of the provincial towns in Germany had gradually formed themselves into guilds or corporations, the members of which, when the business of the day was discussed, would amuse themselves by reading some of the ancient traditions of their own country, as related in the old Nordic poems. This stock of literature was soon exhausted, and the worthy burghers began to try their hands at original composition. From these rude snatches of song sprung to life the fire of poetic genius, and at Mentz was first established that celebrated guild, branches of which soon after extended themselves to most of the provincial towns. The fame of these social meetings soon became widely spread. It reached the ears of the emperor, Otho I., and, about the middle of the ninth century, the guild received a royal summons to attend at Pavia, then the emperor's residence. The history of this famous meeting remained for upward of six hundred years upon record among the archives of Mentz, but is supposed to have been taken away, among other plunder, about the period of the Smalkaldic war. From other sources of information we can, however, gratify the curiosity of the antiquarian, by giving the names of the twelve original members of this guild: