another striking similitude. He is speaking of the progress of the national mind, and compares its ebb and flow to those of the sea :

"We have often thought that the motion of the public mind resembles that of the sea, when the tide is rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back, but the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring. A person who looked on them only for five minutes might fancy that they were rushing capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on them for a quarter of an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear after another, it is impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England."

This beautiful simile may have been suggested by Longinus, who compares Homer, writing the "Iliad," to the ocean at highwater-mark, and Homer, writing the "Odyssey," to the ocean receding within its ordinary limits, yet leaving behind it the vestiges of its former imposing grandeur. It will be seen, however, on a closer examination, that there is nothing in common between the two writers but the object which serves as the means of comparison. But if Macaulay has not borrowed from Longinus, Carlyle has borrowed from Macaulay; for, in one of his Lectures delivered in 1840, I find Macaulay's similitude reproduced in nearly the same words, with this difference, that, while Macaulay employs it to illustrate the progress of the national mind, Carlyle uses it to describe

what he believes to be the retrogression or disappearance of Popery :

Popery cannot come back any more than Paganism can— which also still lingers in some countries. But indeed it is with these things as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither, on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going. Look in half an hour where it is look in half a century where your Popehood is!"

:

La Rochefoucauld, with characteristic insight, says in his 326th Maxim :

"Le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur."

Rousseau, in his "Nouvelle Héloise," has the same remark :

"A considérer ces propos selon nos idées, ils sont bien plus railleurs que mordans, et tombent moins sur le vice que sur le ridicule. Malheur à qui prête le flanc au ridicule; il ne déchire pas seulement les mœurs, la vertu; il marque jusqu'au vice même."

And Viscount D'Arlincourt, in "Trois Châteaux," has expressed it in these words :

"Qu'on nomme quelqu'un homme infâme à Paris, cela frappe à peine: que l'on dise homme ridicule, on est tué du coup."

The same notion occurs in three of our English writers. Pope has it in one of his

Letters :

"I have learned that there are some who would rather be wicked than ridiculous; and therefore it may be safer to attack vices than follies."

Sir Bulwer Lytton, in "England and the English:"

"The aristocratic influences have set up ridicule as the Criminal Code."

And Mrs. Gore in the following passage:

"Be vile, be prodigal, be false, but do not make yourself ridiculous: a butt or a bore ranks with the worst of criminals."

D'Israeli, in the "Literary Character," has this striking observation :—

"The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces ;"

which Lord Byron quotes as a sample of D'Israeli's incomparable wisdom. It turns out, however, that the latter was indebted for the remark, such as it is, to Pope, who says in one of his letters to Swift :

"A few loose things sometimes fall from men of wit, by which censorious fools judge as ill of them as they possibly can, for their own comfort.”

Goldsmith, in the "Citizen of the World," has the same thought :

"The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves the most foolish."

And it occurs in Burke in this pithy form :

"Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of Folly."Reflections on the French Revolution.

In the same work Burke has this remark :

"Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation.”

Which Sir Walter Scott has thus appropriated :

"Those ambitious of distinction are usually friends to innovation.”—Life of Napoleon.

There is another remarkable thought in Burke, which Alison, the historian, has turned to good account. Indeed, it occurs so often in his disquisitions, that he seems to have made it the staple of all wisdom, and the basis of every truth. Burke's words are:

"You had that action and counteraction, which in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe." -Reflections on the French Revolution.

The following are some of the passages in which Alison has reproduced this beautiful sentiment, without condescending, in a single instance, to name the illustrious man from whom he has adopted it :

Playfair traced in the revolution of our globe that mysterious system of action and reaction which pervades alike the moral and the material world."History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon.

"He has forgotten that action and reaction are the law of nature, not less in the moral than in the material world."Ibid.

"In the political not less than the physical world, action and reaction are equal and opposite."-Ibid.

"Action and reaction seems to be the law not less of the moral than the material world."-Ibid.

"The old law of nature is still in operation: action and reaction rule mankind."—Essay on the Year of Revolutions. "Action and reaction is the law, not less of the intellectual than the physical world."-Essay on the Historical Romance.

The foregoing are some examples, from our prose writers, of borrowed thoughts and similes. It must be confessed, however, that it is not always easy to distinguish between actual borrowings, and such as are only so in appearance; between the thoughts which a writer has appropriated, and those which, being founded in nature, have naturally presented themselves to his mind. A deep-sighted thinker, one accustomed to serious meditation, will discover for himself what a man of ordinary capacity has to adopt from others. The one is a producer, the other a reproducer; the one an inventor, the other a copyist; the memory of the latter is stored with borrowed wealth; that of the former with original ideas, which haunt it,

"Like echoes of an antenatal dream."

A fruitful source of unconscious imitation is the word "sweet.' Although its ordinary station is among the commonplaces of poetical diction, there is no expression that adapts itself, with such versatility and ease, to similitudes and to figurative language in general. It