"To whip a rascal for his rags is to pay flattering homage to cloth of gold." "A suspicious man would search a pincushion for treason, and see daggers in a needle case." "Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintance." "What was talked of as the golden chain of love, was nothing but a succession of laughs, a chromatic scale of merriment reaching from earth to Olympus." St. Giles' and St. James' is written to show that "St. James in his brocade may probably learn of St. Giles in his tatters." It abounds in quaint and humorous moralizing. Here is a specimen-- "We cannot say if there really be not a comfort in substantial ugliness: ugliness that unchanged will last a man his life, a good granite face in which there shall be no wear or tear. A man so appointed is saved many alarms, many spasms of pride. Time cannot wound his vanity through his features; he eats, drinks, and is merry in spite of mirrors. No acquaintance starts at sudden alteration, hinting in such surprise, decay and the final tomb. He grows old with no former intimates--churchyard voices--crying 'How you're altered.' How many a man might have been a truer husband, a better father, firmer friend, more valuable citizen, had he, when arrived at legal maturity, cut off, say--an inch of his nose. This inch--only an inch!--would have destroyed the vanity of the very handsomest face, and so driven the thought of a man from a vulgar looking-glass, a piece of shop crystal--and more, from the fatal mirrors carried in the heads of women, to reflect heaven knows how many coxcombs who choose to stare into them--driven the man to the glass of his own mind. With such small sacrifice he might have been a philosopher. Thus considered, how many a coxcomb may be within an inch of a sage!" In another passage of the same book we read--