But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on “Short Cuts,” that if a thing is to be done at all, “then ’twere well it were done quickly,” admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor’s dramatic poem declares in the storm and stress of his career, “We have not time to mourn,” “The worse for us!” is his good counsellor’s rejoinder: “_He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend._ _Eternity mourns that._ ’Tis an ill cure For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them. Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turn’d out, There wisdom will not enter, nor true power, Nor aught that dignifies humanity. Yet such the barrenness of busy life! From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up To reach the naked’st pinnacle of all, While Magnanimity, absolved from toil, Reposes self-included at the base.” _A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT._ PROVERBS xxiii. 2. King Solomon’s discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him; and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man’s dainties, for they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and might beneficially be a standing order for all times.