business--a respectable powdered, bald, pudgy, pacific little body, with no more idea of “going out” than a cow in a field of clover. I forget the precise result--but certainly there was no duel. [2] The Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy and Doctor Elliotson, will doubtless be glad to be informed, that the inspired Scottish Poet was a believer in their magnetismal mysteries--at least in the article of reading a book behind the back. In a letter to Mr. Robert Ainslie, is the following passage in proof. “I have no doubt but scholarcraft may be caught, as a Scotchman catches the itch--by friction. How else can you account for it that born blockheads, by mere dint of _handling_ books, grow so wise that even they themselves are equally convinced of and surprised at their own parts? I once carried that philosophy to that degree, that in a knot of country folks, who had a library amongst them, and who, to the honour of their good sense, made me factotum in the business; one of our members, a little wiselook, squat, upright, jabbering body of a tailor, I advised him instead of turning over the leaves, _to bind the book on his back_. Johnnie took the hint, and as our meetings were every fourth Saturday, and Pricklouse having a good Scots mile to walk in coming, and of course another in returning, Bodkin was sure to lay his hand on some heavy quarto or ponderous folio; with and under which, wrapt up in his gray plaid, he grew wise as he grew weary all the way home. He carried this so far, that an old musty Hebrew Concordance, which we had in a present from a neighbouring priest, _by mere dint of applying it as doctors do a blistering plaster, between his shoulders_, Stitch, in a dozen pilgrimages, acquired as much rational theology as the said priest had done by forty years’ perusal of its pages.” [3] A. Cunningham. ODE TO PERRY, THE INVENTOR OF THE PATENT PERRYAN PEN. “In this good work, Penn appears the greatest, usefullest of God’s instruments. Firm and unbending when the exigency requires it--soft and yielding when rigid inflexibility is not a desideratum, fluent and flowing, at need, for eloquent rapidity--slow and retentive in cases of deliberation--never spluttering or by amplification going wide of the mark--never splitting, if it can be helped, with any one, but ready to wear itself out rather in their service--all things as it were with all men, ready to embrace the hand of Jew, Christian or Mahometan,--heavy with the German, light with the Italian, oblique with the English, upright with the Roman, backward in coming forward with the Hebrew,--in short, for flexibility, amiability, constitutional durability, general ability, and universal utility, it would be hard to find a parallel to the great Penn.”