the general good of the whole body; so that a person occupied in them is doing good in the strictest sense of the words,”that is, he is forwarding and preserving the happiness of the society of which he is a member. Human society is thus compared to a vast and intricate machine, composed of innumerable wheels and pulleys. "Every one has his special handle to grind at some with great and obvious effects, others with little or no assignable result; but if the object ultimately produced by the combined efforts of all is in itself a good one, it cannot be denied that whatever is essential to its production is good also."

Mendelssohn writes in one of his letters from Rome, “I love any one who adopts and perseveres in some particular pursuit, prosecuting it to the best of his ability, and endeavouring to perfect it for the benefit of mankind." This he says by way of apology for an otherwise tedious and unattractive personage, with whom he was then consorting. No doubt he could have found it in him to admire, after a sort,—in the old grammatical, if not in the vulgar, sense of the word, the earnestness of Elia's Mrs. Battle at the card-table; to admire her never conniving at miscellaneous conversation during a game; admire her emphasized observation that cards were cards, and her impatience at having "her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties," considered in the light of a mere amusement. "It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do,—and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards, over a book." She could have entered into the gamester's stanzas in Mr. Browning's lyric-as well the counter as coin, he submits, when your table's a hat, and your prize a dram.

"Stake your counter as boldly every whit,
Venture as truly, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,

If you choose to play-is my principle !

Let a man contend to the uttermost

For his life's set prize, be it what it will.'

Think earnestly upon any subject, investigate it sincerely, and you

are sure to love it, Sir A. Helps assures us: "There have been enthusiasts about heraldry. Many have devoted themselves to chess." The occasion for this remark is, a querist's alleged perplexity what to choose as his point of action, and still more how to begin upon it. The answer is another query. Is no work of benevolence brought near to you by the peculiar circumstances of your life? If there is, follow it at once. If not, still you must not wait for something apposite to occur. "Take up any subject relating to the welfare of mankind, the first that comes to hand: read about it: think about it: trace it in the world, and see if it will not come to your heart." That many have devoted themselves to chess—to say nothing of the unique Sarah Battle's lifelong devotion to whist-suggests the question, Is the welfare of living, thinking, suffering, eternal creatures, less interesting than the knight's move, and the progress of a pawn?

But opportunities of doing good, the author of Organization in Daily Life insists, "though abundant, and obvious enough, are not exactly fitted to our hands: we must be alert in preparing ourselves for them." Benevolence, on his showing, requires method and activity in its exercise. Whatsoever the hand findeth to do, is to be done with the right hand's might; but that right hand must owe its cunning to the brain, its energy of impulse to the heart.

XXVII.

PENAL PANEGYRIC.

PROVERBS Xxvii. 14.

T stands written in the Proverbs of Solomon, that whoso

IT

"blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him." Save me from my friends, of that sort. The blessing roared forth in boisterous tones at that unseasonable hour, and at that unreasonable pitch of a stentorian voice, startling the object of it from his slumbers,

and stirring the neighbourhood to protest, comes in no sense as a blessing in disguise. It is a crying evil. There is such a thing as-Pope has made classical the expression—to damn with faint praise. But it is only too possible to produce the like result with loud praise. So loud, that the echo rebounds with a vengeance, almost cracks the ear-drum, and quite frets and lacerates the aural nerve. Such loud blessing is in effect a malison, not a benison; no boon, but a bane.

Mendelssohn laments, in one of his letters from Switzerland, his inability to form any judgment of his new compositions— to tell whether they are good or bad,-his alleged reason for this incompetency being, that all the people to whom he had played anything for the last twelve months, forthwith glibly declared it to be wonderfully beautiful. "And that will never do," exclaims Felix, reviewing his position. "I really wish that some one would let me have a little rational blame once more, or what would be still more agreeable, a little rational praise, and then I should find it less indispensable to act the censor towards myself, and to be so distrustful of my own powers.' Certainly moderate praise, writes Lord Bacon, used with opportunity, and not vulgar, is that which doeth the good. much magnifying of man or matter doth irritate contradiction, and procure envy and scorn." Owen Feltham holds it a greater injury to be over than under valued. "There is no detraction worse than to over-praise a man; for if his worth prove short of what report doth speak of him, his own actions are ever giving the lie to his honour." Churchill shrewdly says of the poet in general, but with a particular application to himself:

"Greatly his foes he dreads, but more his friends ;
He hurts me most who lavishly commends."

"Too

The art of praising has been described by an accomplished French critic as one of the rarest proofs of literary talent,—a much surer and more delicate indication of it than is the gift of supreme excellence in satire.

Of the two evils, an excess of ridicule and an excess of flattery, there can be no doubt, rules a home authority, that ridicule is

by far the least damaging to a man of merit who is working his

way.

Praise undeserved is censure in disguise; and even at a public dinner one may now and then see, it is allowed, that the object of a thoroughgoing piece of flattery is not smirking, but is really annoyed at the folly and impudence of his eulogist. "The more a man appreciates his own services to science or adventure or letters or anything else, the less likely he is to endure with patience the clumsy and misplaced praises of the man who knows nothing of the subject except what he has learnt by hastily looking out his victim's name in Men of the Time," but who ladles out masses of hot, greasy, steaming adulation, -like the pancakes in the ballad that were egged on" till enough to poison poor Jack.

66

The worst detractor, writes an essayist on "Laurels," is less of an enemy than the unflinching panegyrist, though the sugariness of panegyric on the palate makes men whom it would be absurd to call weak cry out that there is nothing so delicious, nothing so proper, albeit an hour of candid reflection would convince them irresistibly that there is nothing so ruinous, or so destructive of anything like free growth. Swift likens praise to ambergris; a little whiff of it, and by snatches, is very agreeable; but "when a man holds a whole lump of it to his nose, it is a stink, and strikes you down." La Bruyère is intolerant of the affected superlatives of eulogy with which some folks overrate some books; and after enumerating some of the exaggerated phrases in vogue, "nuisibles à cela même qui est louable, et qu'on veut louer," he demands, why can't they simply say, Voilà un bon livre.

"A vile encomium doubly ridicules:

There's nothing blackens like the ink of fools.

If true, a woful likeness; and if lies,

Praise undeserved is scandal in disguise."

If Horace speaks slightingly of Plautus, as of Ennius, it must be said, with Dean Liddell, that he was provoked by the fashion which in his day prevailed of overrating the old Roman writers. It is a sort of dead-weight incumbrance, as the Greek proverb

runs, to be praised overmuch: Βάρος τι και τὸ δ ̓ ἐστιν αἰνεῖσθαι λίαν. Aíav. Dryden says in one of his University of Oxford prologues, that,

"When our fop gallants, or our city folly,

Clap over-loud, it makes us melancholy;

We doubt that scene which does their wonder raise,
And, for their ignorance, contemn their praise."

The grandson of his Achithophel, another Shaftesbury, after inveighing against the satire of the day as scurrilous and witless, adds: "Our encomium or panegyric is as fulsome and displeasing, by its prostitute and abandoned manner of praise. The worthy persons who are the subjects of it, may well be esteemed sufferers by the manner." The ridiculous exaggeration of the praise lavished on Racine, not only "revolted" the admirers of Corneille, but did Racine harm with moderate men, and made the judicious grieve. When Italian comedy was introduced into France, under the auspices of Cardinal Mazarin, the enthusiasm affected by such supple courtiers as Mortemart and Grammont, and the hyperboles of laudation in which they indulged, soon made the newly imported attraction a veritable bore to people of temperate tastes, such as Madame de Motteville, sober of speech herself, and confessedly ennuyée by si fortes exagérations. It was sage counsel that Fontenelle gave to Lassonne to do his best to keep his friends from praising him in excess; "for the public is apt to treat with utter severity those of whom their partisans make too much." Sainte-Beuve taxes M. Aimé Martin with drawing an ideally romantic portrait of Bernardin de St. Pierre, and in fact writing one of those "impossible biographies" which at once put a reader of good sense on his guard. Macaulay observes of Johnson's extravagant estimate of a well-known and "noble passage" in Congreve's Mourning Bride, which the Doctor, both in writing and in conversation, extolled above any other in the English drama, —that it "has suffered greatly in the public estimation from the extravagance of his praise." The same critic, in his strictures on Mr. Gleig's "puerile adulation" of Warren Hastings, is confident that the Governor-General would have preferred