The Greek pentameters, containing the 'Admonitions of Theognis the Megarian' form one of the strangest compositions I ever read. They are as complete a medley as any _colluvies_ of vegetables, shells, and bones, swept by the Noachic flood into the hollows of the earth. Here a petrified rose-leaf rests its cheek upon a nettle; here lies the bill of a dove, and here a shark's tooth; here is the grinning chasm of a lion's jaws, and here the skeleton of a loving lamb. A kindly maxim is followed by a cynic snarl, and exhortations to universal affection sleep side by side with counsels to entire distrust in man. They are probably the 'disjecta membra'--a pest on the pedantry of Latin!--the scattered limbs of several moralists, and in their present incoherency, they remind one of that anomalous species of union facetiously styled by grammarians, a '_con_junction _dis_junctive!' The proverbs of Solomon, apart from their inspiration, are of clearer and more comprehensive wisdom than all the parœmial precepts of the world beside. But among them, as Peter said of the writings of his brother Paul, there are 'some things hard to be understood.' As one instance out of many, I refer to Prov. xxvi. 4, 5. 'Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him;' and again, 'Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit'--directions which it requires the wit of an Œdipus fully to explain, and the wisdom of Solomon himself to act out with appropriate discrimination. Among all modern books of that cast, I prefer the 'Lacon' of the eccentric Colton. Straggling through the fields of life after the Greek and Roman reapers, he has bound his gleanings into a bundle scarce inferior to their sheaves in beauty and abundance. If hardly equal to some of his Gallic rivals in glitter and acuteness, neither has he dazzled the eyes of Truth with sparkling falsehoods, nor pierced the heart of Virtue with the darts of slander, nor sundered with the sword of sarcasm the fresh-strung nerves of Hope. Expressing thoughts at once noble, original, and true, in words always happy, and in a style at times of almost unrivalled elegance, the teachings of his few brief pages are of more value than all the tawdry sentiment and flimsy ethics scattered through the fifty 'parvum in multo' volumes of the _Last_ of the _Baronets_.