Were I home and in my library the downturned leaf of the duodecimo biography in the left corner of the first shelf would tell it you at a glance. The biography of Lord Erskine; marked at the page which speaks of his dauntless legal debut in the Sandwich case, when not the necessity of speaking in a crowded court-room from the obscure back benches: when not the sarcastic eyes of a hundred (etiquette-ly termed) brethren; when not the awful presence of Lord Mansfield nor his rebuking interruption at a critical sentence frightened the self-possession of the enthusiastic advocate, or stopped the current of his eloquent invective. The biography, which goes on to tell how, when the speech was ended, all the attorneys in the room flocked around the debutant with retainers--needed, more than all the smiles and congratulations to be drawn from earnest heart-wells: and how the advocate replied--(when some one, timid of the judge, asked how the barrister had the courage to stand the rebuking interruption, and never to quail with embarrassment before it)--_I felt my little children tugging at my gown and crying, now is the time, father, to get us bread_. How eloquent! How worthy of a father's heart! And in the reference, the dullest mind cannot fail to read the "something" which, to every father in a like position, nerves the will, disarms all agitation, clears the heavy brain, and oils the tongue with every pungency of rhetoric. --The shadowy form turns closer towards me as my reverie yet chains me to the lake side, where the mountain breezes still are freshening all the August air.-- You have a purpose now in life, which, like the messenger of the king, that every morning knocked at his bedroom door to say, "Oh king, remember all this day that you are mortal," hourly brings to mind the bright reward of every toil and every aspiration. Besides a physical frame there is a mental constitution hinging on your own. There's a long life far beyond your own brief years of breath to provide for. Your name is to be perpetuated. In the very evening of your life there is to be a star that is now in its morning of existence, which will cheer and enliven. You feel all this as in some sad hour of the sickly night; you pace your room with the little sufferer wrestling with disease, and you feel that in the future will be found ample rewards for all your present bitter draughts of anxiety. Wrestling with disease!