The tallest pines feel most the pow’r Of wintry blasts; the loftiest tow’r Comes heaviest to the ground; The bolts that spare the mountain’s side His cloud-capt eminence divide, And spread the ruin round. The well-inform’d philosopher Rejoices with a wholesome fear, And hopes, in spite of pain; If Winter bellow from the North, Soon the sweet Spring comes dancing And Nature laughs again. If hindrances obstruct thy way, Thy magnanimity display, And let thy strength be seen; But oh! if fortune fill thy sail With more than a propitious gale, Take half thy canvass in. _Cowper._ CHRONOLOGY. 1308. On the 1st of January in this year, William Tell, the Swiss patriot, associated himself on this day with a band of his countrymen, against the tyranny of their oppressors. For upwards of three centuries the opposition was carried on, and terminated by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, declaring the independence of Switzerland. 1651. On the 1st of January Charles II. was crowned at Scone king of the Scots. Charles, when a child, was weak in the legs, and ordered to wear _steel-boots_. Their weight so annoyed him that he pined till recreation became labour. An old rocker took off the _steel-boots_, and concealed them; promising the countess of Dorset, who was Charles’s governess, that she would take any blame for the act on herself. Soon afterwards the king, Charles I., coming into the nursery, and seeing his boy’s legs without the boots, angrily demanded who had done it? “It was I, sir,” said the rocker, “who had the honour, some thirty years since, to attend on your highness, in _your_ infancy, when _you_ had the same infirmity wherewith now the prince, your very own son is troubled; and then the lady Cary, (afterwards countess of Monmouth) commanded _your steel-boots_ to be taken off, who, blessed be God, since have gathered strength, and arrived at a good stature.” Clare, chaplain to Charles II., at the time the affair happened, related this anecdote to old Fuller, who in 1660, contemplating “the restoration,” tells the story, and quaintly exclaims, “the nation is too noble, when his majesty shall return from foreign parts, to impose any other _steel-boots_ upon him, than the observing the laws of the land, which are his own _stockings_, that so with joy and comfort he may enter on what was his own inheritance.” The nation forgot the “steel-boots,” and Charles forgot the “stockings.”