They were the last words he spoke; and Raeburn's villany boasted yet another victim. THE PROFESSOR'S TALES. THE ENTHUSIAST. There is a splendid book written, called "The Enthusiast;" but, though it discovers the author's talents, to my apprehension and feelings, it fails, after a few pages, to keep alive the attention--and why? Just because the author, portraying the general character of enthusiasm, steps beyond himself and his own personal observations, and talks about the workings of the principle in a new and untried combination of circumstances. From the law which regulates projectiles in _aere_, he reasons to what should regulate them _in vacuo_; he reasons from things seen to things unseen; and then leaves both himself and his reader in the mud and the mist of mere supposition. But, in what I mean to say of enthusiasm, I pledge myself to state nothing but what I have felt or seen; and I shall separate this principle from all others, only marking its influence when it is in a state of intensity, as one marks the electric spark, not in the cloud or the machine, but as it passes from one locality to another. Enthusiasm is, in fact, the electrical element of life. It is more or less everywhere, and often where it is least suspected. It bursts forth, occasionally, in the character of the warrior, the scholar, the poet, the speculator; but it remains as substantially, perhaps, though not so ostensibly, in the bosom of the parent, the husband, the wife, the child, the friend, the kinsman. The tradesman is an enthusiast, if he hopes to succeed; the merchant, the labourer, the mechanic. I have seen a shoemaker as enthusiastic in making his shoes fit neatly without pinching, as the scholar would be in divining the meaning of a difficult passage. Without enthusiasm man had never been what he is. It found him in the world naked, and it clothed him; houseless, and it covered him; defenceless, and it armed him. It run him up through the pastoral, the agricultural, to the commercial state. It composed the "Idylls" of Theocritus, the "Georgics" of Virgil, and the "Fleece" of Dyer. Without this there had been no shepherds to sing, and no poets to sing of their singing; no husbandmen to labour, and no Virgils and Hesiods to speak of their labour and argonautic expeditions; and no sacred bard to celebrate their pursuit of the golden fleece, commerce. But, though all this is true, in the enlarged and diluted sense of the word, it is not so in that sense in which the term is commonly understood. He is quite an enthusiast in the pursuit of knowledge--of a fox--or of hoped-for discovery--or of fame or of fortune--anybody knows to be terms applied to an unusually spirited pursuit of any or all of these. But the enthusiasm of which I speak is more limited still. It is a glow which originates and cools in the same bosom; which has no view beyond itself. It is not a mean to an end, but mean and end in one. Look at that boy: he is never to be found at a