[Footnote 1: This was the same Apollonius, who while one day vehemently haranguing the populace at Ephesus, suddenly broke off and exclaimed--_Strike the tyrant, strike him!--the blow is given!--he is wounded--he is fallen--he dies!_ And at that very moment the emperor Domitian had been stabbed at Rome.] [Footnote 2: Aristophanes ridiculed them both on the stage with great humour and success.] BIOGRAPHY--FOR THE MIRROR SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THE LATE MR. HODGKINSON. The illustrious lord Verulam, detailing in one of his essays the various motives to envy in the human bosom, says, “men of birth are noted to be envious towards new men--for their distance is altered.” His lordship might with safety have extended the proposition to those whom either wealth, or casualty unconnected with high descent or personal merit, have raised to worldly power and prosperity. Men who have been lifted to the summits of society by the accumulation of money, still more than those who stand there in right of the decayed merit of their ancestry look down with scorn upon their fellow-beings who toil below, and too often view with jealousy and repugnance, the endeavours of those who aspire to that eminence, of which they themselves are so vain and ostentatious. Elevation from an humble condition to conspicuity and rank, bespeaks superior personal merit; and to many of those who figure in, what is called, high life, it is to be feared that the bare mention of personal merit, would look like an indirect reproach. Not only in that class, however, but in most others of society, there are multitudes who can boast of very different sentiments--men of real worth and discernment, who do not disdain to contemplate the exertions of a powerful mind in its aspirations to dignity, nor turn with contempt from the man whom nature has enriched, though it should have been his lot to come into the world under the depression of a needy or obscure parentage.--Persons of liberal hearts, and luminous minds well know that in the moral world there are natural laws, which like those of gravitation in the physical, oppose the elevation of all whom chance has thrown down to the bottom of life, rendering it difficult or rather indeed utterly impracticable for them to rise, but by means of the most gigantic powers; and therefore consider those who emerge to the top by the fair exercise of their natural talents, as the only valuable levellers--the real and substantial asserters of the equality of men.