in Lord Burlington's garden, with his hands in his waistcoat pockets, biting off the sunny sides of the peaches. That King Solomon, who wrote so wisely of training children, had so wicked a son as Rehoboam. That the good stoic, Marcus Aurelius, of proverbial purity, had so doubtful a wife as Faustina, and so vicious a son as Commodus. That that good old Roman emperor, whose Meditations rank with the best works of the greatest moralists, breathing and inculcating the spirit of Christianity, was the bitter persecutor of the Christians in Gaul. That his graceless heir, Commodus, left the Christians wholly untroubled, through the influence of his mistress Marcia. That the English-reading world is directly indebted to the Reign of Terror--the horrors of Robespierre's tyranny--for the most popular translation of St. Pierre's sweet story of Paul and Virginia. That the author of the Marseillaise first heard of the great fame of his piece in the mountains of Piedmont, when fleeing from France as a political refugee; and upon the return of the Bourbons to power wrote an anthem which is characterized as the most anti-republican ever penned. That that ode to temperance, The Old Oaken Bucket, was written by Woodworth, a journeyman printer, under the inspiration of brandy. That so many of the exquisite letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were destroyed by her mother, who "did not approve that she should disgrace her family by adding to it literary honors." That the famous speech of Pitt, in reply to Walpole's taunt of being "a young man," was composed by Dr. Johnson. That Johnson, looking at Dilly's edition of Lord Chesterfield's miscellaneous works, laughed and said, "Here are now two speeches ascribed to him, both of which were written by me: and the best of it is, they have found out that one is like Demosthenes, and the other like Cicero." That many of the sermons of famous contemporaneous clergymen were the productions of the same laborious Grub Street drudge, forty or more of which have been reclaimed and published, and conceded to have been written by the inexhaustible Johnson. That the only paper of The Rambler which had a prosperous sale, and may be said to have been popular, was one which Johnson did not write--No. 97, written by Richardson. That the essays of The Rambler, elaborate as they appear, were written rapidly, seldom undergoing revision, whilst the simple language of Rousseau, which seems to come flowing from the heart, was the slow production of painful toil, pausing on every word, and balancing every sentence. That Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which has the free and easy flow of extemporaneous eloquence, was polished with extraordinary care,--more than a dozen proofs being worked off and destroyed, according to Dodsley's account, before he could please himself. That the winged passages in Curran's speeches, which seem born of the moment, were the results of painstaking, protracted labor. ("My dear fellow," said he to