The most important principle perhaps in life is to have a pursuit--a useful one if possible, and at all events an innocent one. The unripe fruit tree of knowledge is, I believe, always bitter or sour; and scepticism and discontent--sickness of the mind--are often the results of devouring it.--_Sir Humphry Davy_. * * * * * COFFIN OF KING DUNCAN. A coffin has been discovered among the ruins of Elgin cathedral, supposed to be that of the royal victim of Macbeth. * * * * * AN IMPERIAL ENCORE. When Cimarosa's opera of _Matrimonio Segreto_ was performed before the Emperor Joseph, he invited all the singers to a banquet, and then in a fit of enthusiasm, sent them all back to the theatre to play and sing the whole opera over again!--_Foreign Review_. * * * * * _Dinner_ is a corruption of _decimer_, from _decimheure_, or the French repast _de dix-heure. Supper_ from _souper_, from the custom of providing soup for that occasion. * * * * * LARKS. We have heard much of _Dunstable larks_ but the enthusiasm with which _gourmets_ speak of these tit-bits of luxury, is far exceeded by the Germans, who travel to Leipsic from a distance of many hundred miles, merely to eat a dinner of larks, and then return contented and peaceful to their families. So great is the slaughter of this bird at the Leipsic fair, that half a million are annually devoured, principally by the booksellers frequenting the city. What is the favourite bird at the coffee-house dinners of our friends in Paternoster Row? * * * * * PAINTING CATS. Gottfried Mind, a celebrated Swiss painter, was called the _Cat-Raphael_, from the excellence with which he painted that animal. This peculiar talent was discovered and awakened by chance. At the time when Freudenberger was painting that since-published picture of the peasant cleaving wood before his cottage, with his wife sitting by, and feeding her child with pap out of a pot, round which a cat is prowling, Mind cast a broad stare on the sketch of this last figure, and said in his rugged, laconic way, "That is no cat!" Freudenberger asked, with a smile, whether Mind thought he could do it better. Mind offered to try; went into a corner, and drew the cat, which Freudenberger liked so much that he made his new pupil finish it out, and the master copied the scholar's work--for it is Mind's cat that is engraven in Freudenberger's plate. Imitations of Mind's cats are already common in the windows of printsellers. * * * * * PLAY-WRITING.