says Shakspeare’s Troilus to Ulysses—modest, valiant Trojan, to shrewd, circumspect Greek. So another Trojan to another Greek, in the same play—which Coleridge reckoned almost the most wonderful of Shakspeare’s all—Æneas, namely, to Agamemnon; or rather, indeed, Æneas to himself, in Agamemnon’s hearing:— ... “But peace, Æneas, Peace Trojan; lay thy finger on thy lips! The worthiness of praise disdains his worth, If that the praised himself bring the praise forth: But what the repining enemy commends, That breath fame follows; that praise, sole pure, transcends.” And in yet another scene, Agamemnon, King of Men, pithily and pointedly tells that stalwart dullard—big, blustering, boisterous Ajax—who, for the life of him, cannot see the pith or point of it, that “whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.” Ajax suspects not the general to mean that _he_, son of Telamon, is his own praise, his own chronicle. One more excerpt from our myriad-minded poet:—“Then we wound our modesty, and make foul the clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we publish them.” The wise saw drops from the sententious lips of the sage old steward of the Countess of Roussillon in what is probably as little read and slightly relished as any of Shakspeare’s plays. * * * * * Years ago there used to perambulate the streets of London, a prodigy of a hat, some seven feet high, the trade-mark advertisement of a hatter in the Strand. This gigantic puff Mr. Carlyle once made the text for some characteristic strictures on the puffery of the age. Every man his own trumpeter: that he alleged was, to an alarming extent, the accepted rule. “Make loudest possible proclamation of your hat.” Against which doctrine our strenuous _censor morum_ objected, that nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings; but, on the contrary, forbids all men to make such. There is not, he contends, a man, or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellences, and prowesses, and supremacy in his craft. His inmost heart says to him, “Leave thy friends to speak of these: if possible, thy enemies to speak of these; but at all events, thy friends.” _PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, & EXPOSED SKULL._ 2 KINGS ix. 30, 35. Jezebel’s painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas in the “Vision of Sin:” “You are bones, and what of that? Every face, however full, Padded round with flesh and fat, Is but modell’d on a skull. “Death is king, and Vivat Rex! Tread a measure on the stones, Madam—if I know your sex From the fashion of your bones.”