good God would be as satisfied under a rose-tree as on an altar.' At these words an angel descended from heaven to announce her pardon, and to comfort the pious criminal, who was burnt on a stake, of which the rose-tree formed the first fagot." There is a tradition that one night, Gabriel, from his seat in paradise, heard the voice of God sweetly responding to a human heart. The angel said, "Surely this must be an eminent servant of the Most High, whose spirit is dead to lust and lives on high." The angel hastened over land and sea to find this man, but could not find him in the earth or heavens. At last he exclaimed, "O Lord, show me the way to the object of thy love!" God answered, "Turn thy steps to yon village, and in that pagoda thou shalt behold him." The angel sped to the pagoda, and therein found a solitary man kneeling before an idol. Returning, he cried, "O master of the world! hast thou looked with love on a man who invokes an idol in a pagoda?" God said, "I consider not the error of ignorance: this heart, amid its darkness, hath the highest place." Anaxagoras, whose disciples were Socrates and Pericles and Euripides, in reply to a question, said he believed those to be most happy who seem least to be so; and that we must not look among the rich and great for persons who taste true happiness, but among those who till a small piece of ground, or apply themselves to the sciences, without ambition. "The fairest lives, in my opinion," said Montaigne, "are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model, without miracle, without extravagance." "If some great men," said Mandeville, "had not a superlative pride, and everybody understood the enjoyment of life, who would be a lord chancellor, a prime minister, or a grand pensionary?" There is in existence a precious old album containing the handwriting of many renowned men, such as Luther, Erasmus, Mosheim, and others. The last-mentioned has written, in Latin, the following remarkable words: "Renown is a source of toil and sorrow; obscurity is a source of happiness." "Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel," asks Jeremy Taylor, "than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices, for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armor, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for safety?" "The world," said Goethe, "could not exist, if it were not so simple. This ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again."