Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for which contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between the maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; but the side to which they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion. Neither can they carry out any design of their own, if their friends take it in hand to over-persuade them. If a man of this stamp has painted a picture he can be induced to change the whole key, the central circumstance and the principal figure, at the suggestion of a confident critic who is only a pupil in the art of which he is, at least technically, a master. If he is preaching or lecturing, he thinks more of the people he is addressing than of what he has to say; and, though impelled at times to use the scalping-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehement advocates at times, these men's enthusiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself out by its own energy of expression; and how fierce soever their aspect when they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries not to be revealed in time nor space. _THE ART OF RETICENCE._ Among other classifications we may divide the world into those who live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last however, are rare; few people having capacity enough to construct any persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even begun--it being so much easier to follow nature than to work by rule and square, and to drift with the stream than to build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in the matter of reticence;--How few people understand this as an art, and how almost entirely it is by the mere chance of temperament whether a person is confidential or reticent--with his heart on his sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe--irritatingly silent or contemptibly loquacious. Sometimes indeed we do find one who, like Talleyrand, has mastered the art of an eloquent reticence from alpha to omega, and knows how to conceal everything without showing that he conceals anything; but we find such a person very seldom, and we do not always understand his value when we have him.