But, meantime, spite of the large income of Tom and Lady Barbara, the old squire has strange suspicions of mortgages, and dealings with Jews. He has actually inklings of horrid post-obits; and groans as he looks on his old oaks, as he rides through his woods and parks, foreseeing their overthrow; nay, he fancies he sees the land-agent among his quiet old farmers, like a wild-cat in a rabbit warren, startling them out of their long dream of ease and safety, with news of doubled rents, and notices to quit, to make way for threshing-machines, winnowing-machines, corn-crushers, patent ploughs, scufflers, scarifiers, and young men of more enterprise. And, sure enough, such will be the order of the day the moment the estate falls to the YOUNG SQUIRE.--_Country Year Book._ [From Hogg's Instructor.] PRESENCE OF MIND--A FRAGMENT. BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY. The Roman _formula_ for summoning an earnest concentration of the faculties upon any object whatever, that happened to be critically urgent, was _Hoc age_, "Mind _this_!" or, in other words, do not mind _that_--_non illud age_. The antithetic formula was "_aliud_ agere," to mind something alien, or remote from the interest then clamoring for attention. Our modern military orders of "_Attention!_" and "_Eyes strait!_" were both included in the "_Hoc age_." In the stern peremptoriness of this Roman formula we read a picturesque expression of the Roman character both as to its strength and its weakness--of the energy which brooked no faltering or delay (for beyond all other races the Roman was _natus rebus agendis_)--and also of the morbid craving for action, which was intolerant of any thing but the intensely practical. In modern times, it is we of the Anglo-Saxon blood, that is, the British and the Americans of the United States, who inherit the Roman temperament with its vices and its fearful advantages of power. In the ancient Roman these vices appeared more barbarously conspicuous. We, the countrymen of Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, and at one time the leaders of austere thinking, can not be supposed to shrink from the speculative through any native incapacity for sounding its depths. But the Roman had a real inaptitude for the speculative: to _him_ nothing was real that was not practical. He had no metaphysics; he wanted the metaphysical instinct. There was no school of _native_ Roman philosophy: the Roman was merely an eclectic or _dilettanti_ picking up the crumbs which fell from Grecian tables; and even mathematics was so repulsive in its sublimer aspects to the Roman mind, that the very word mathematics had in Rome collapsed into another name for the dotages of astrology. The mathematician was a mere variety of expression for the wizard or the conjurer.