Scott vividly illustrates in “Rokeby” the position of unconscious and therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond’s breast, “just ere the spring his finger pressed;” and the interruption of Guy Denzil’s approach makes the ruffian retire, _rê infectâ_: “They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath, Doomed to captivity or death, Their thoughts to one sad subject lent, Saw not nor heard the ambushment. Heedless and unconcerned they sate, While on the very verge of fate; Heedless and unconcerned remained, When Heaven the murderer’s arm restrained; As ships drift darkling down the tide, Nor see the shelves o’er which they glide.” _NO LEISURE._ ST. MARK vi. 31. That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties, and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had _no leisure_ so much as to eat.” Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything; results produced at once; something to show, and something that may _tell_. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’ statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told, once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can. It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no