THE MAN OF UNDERSTANDING.

"When thou seest a man of understanding, get thee betimes unto him, and let thy feet wear the steps of his door."-Ecc. vi. 36.

YES, in a world of weak ones, it is our duty, it will be our pleasure, and, ye selfish generation, it will be for our interest too, to yield favours to the wise, and bread to men of understanding. Our patronage will be but rarely exercised, and few will be the loaves for these wise men to devour, for I looked, and lo! they are a solitary and scanty band, unobtrusive, like the hermit of the mountains.

But, though the "man of understanding" is rarely to be seen, and, though it would profit us much under the sun, to gather the honey of his lips, such is our perverseness, our folly, or our fate, that, untrodden by our "feet," we suffer the moss to gather on the "steps of his door."

My study window overlooks the house of an eminent physician: he understands accurately the nice movements of the human machine; he is a botanist, skilled in the properties of plants, the cedar of Libanus, and the "hyssop on the wall;" he has meditated on the system of nature, and he has tried many of the processes of art. I see him turning over the volumes which contain the secrets of medicine, and I hear him describe skilfully, the various modes to blunt, or to extract, the arrows of disease. But, alas! my careless countrymen, "all this availeth him nothing." The blind, the maim, and the halt of our villages, refuse bread to this "man of understanding," and measure their wheat, in brimming bushels, to the quack, who cannot distinguish between a fever and the gout, who applies his nippers to a wart, and thinks he extracts a cancer, who poisons you with antimony, curdles your blood with calomel, drenches you with enfeebling teas, and, as a wit once expressed it, prescribes draughts so neutral, they declare neither for the patient nor the malady. If the royal preacher, in whose writings I find my text, had seen whole villages, clamorous, at the midnight hour, for a fetid quack, and

his powders, and "passing by on the other side," when they see the regular practitioner, he would have forgotten, for a moment all the wisdom of the east, and, like provoked Peter, in the gospel, would "curse and swear" at such egregious folly.

Those of my readers, who will gladly turn out of the paths of error, when they hear a warning voice behind them, "here is a better path, walk therein," will, I hope, learn the value of "men of understanding." When their value is once known, the "steps of their door" will be hourly ascended. They will teach us how to think, to speak, and to act. If divines, they will not attempt to persuade you, that heaven cannot be taken, but by the violence of Scotch divinity. If lawyers, they will not demand exorbitant fees to support a rotten cause. If physicians, you will hear them utter no words more cramp than "temperance" and "regimen." If moralists, they will mark the difference between wisdom and cunning, they will point out the weakness, as well as wickedness, of those petty frauds, those iniquitous contracts, those tricking arts of jockeyship, so frequent and so disgraceful among a rural people, where nought but

simplicity should be found. To such divines you will cheerfully vote the amplest salary, and you will receive in exchange that wisdom, which we are assured, in a volume of the highest authority, is better than rubies.

ON VERSATILITY.

"For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant to all, that I might gain the more. To the weak, became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men."-1 Cor. ix. 19. 22.

In this description of pliability, St. Paul exhibits a happy likeness of his own character, and justifies, by his own illustrious and moral example, the excellency of an accommodating spirit. There is scarcely any feature in the characters of mankind that I view with more complacency, than that useful and pleasing versatility, for which "so many "shining ones" have been conspicuous, and which has so liberally contributed to social gratification. As we are, in the holy writings, shadowed out, under the picturesque image of "strangers and pilgrims," merely visiting, or wandering in this world, it behoves us so to fashion our deport