upon an equal footing, and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us'?" Boswell once said, "A man is reckoned a wise man, rather for what he does not say, than for what he says: perhaps upon the whole Limbertongue speaks a greater quantity of good sense than Manly does, but Limbertongue gives you such floods of frivolous nonsense that his sense is quite drowned. Manly gives you unmixed good sense only. Manly will always be thought the wisest man of the two." Corwin, a brilliant wit and humorist of the Sydney Smith stamp, and in his time the greatest of American stump-orators, was often heard to say that his life was a failure, because he had not been, with the public, more successful in serious veins. A friend relates that he was riding with him one day, when Corwin remarked of a speech made the evening before, "It was very good indeed, but in bad style. Never make the people laugh. I see that you cultivate that. It is easy and captivating, but death in the long run to the speaker." "Why, Mr. Corwin, you are the last man living I expected such an opinion from." "Certainly, because you have not lived so long as I have. Do you know, my young friend, that the world has a contempt for the man that entertains it? One must be solemn--solemn as an ass--never say anything that is not uttered with the greatest gravity, to win respect. The world looks up to the teacher and down at the clown; yet, nine cases out of ten, the clown is the better fellow of the two." Sydney Smith is reported to have said to his eldest brother, a grave and prosperous gentleman: "Brother, you and I are exceptions to the laws of nature. You have risen by your gravity, and I have sunk by my levity." In one of Steele's Tatlers, Sancroft asked the question, why it was that actors, speaking of things imaginary, affected audiences as if they were real; whilst preachers, speaking of things real, could only affect their congregations as with things imaginary. Bickerstaff answered, "Why, indeed, I don't know; unless it is that we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary." This answer, besides being borrowed by Betterton, has been credited to every famous actor since Steele printed it. Every reader of Charles Lamb remembers his amusing essay on the Origin of Roast Pig. The legend of the first act of oyster-eating is enough like it to remind one of it. It is related that a man, walking one day by the shore of the sea, picked up one of those savory bivalves, just as it was in the act of gaping. Observing the extreme smoothness of the interior of the shells, he insinuated his finger that he might feel the shining surface, when suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, causing a sensation less pleasurable than he anticipated.