which priests are, from their office, members of the committee or vestry of the commune.  The priest or priests of the parish have the regular inspection of the school-master, and are required by the government to see that he does his duty, while each priest, at the same time, sees that the children of his flock attend regularly.  After the child has been the appointed number of years at school, it receives from the schoolmaster, and the priest of the religion to which it belongs, a certificate, without which it cannot procure employment.  To employ any, person under twenty-one, without such a certificate, is illegal, and punished by a fixed fine, as is almost every other offence in this part of Germany; and the fines are never remitted, which makes punishment always certain.  The schoolmaster is paid much in the same way as in Scotland; by a house, a garden, and sometimes a field, and by a small salary from the parish, and by fixed rates for the children.

A second law, which is coeval with the school law, renders it illegal for any young man to marry before he is twenty-five, or any young woman before she is eighteen; and a young man, at whatever age he wishes to marry, must show, to the police and the priest of the commune where he resides, that he is able, and has the prospect, to provide for a wife and family.—­London’s Mag.  Nat.  Hist.

* * * * *

EATING AND WRITING.

Ovid, Horace, and Virgil all frequented the tables of the great; Cato warmed his virtue with wine; Shakspeare kept up his verve with stolen venison; Steele and Addison wrote their best papers over a bottle; Sir Walter Scott is famed for good housekeeping; and I know authors who love to dine like lords.  Even booksellers do their spiriting more gently for good fare, and bid for an author the most spiritedly after dinner.

There is not a more vulgar mistake than that of confounding good eating with gluttony and excess.  It is not because a man gets twenty or five-and-twenty guineas per sheet for a dashing article, and has taste to expend his well-earned cash upon a cook who knows how to dress a dinner, that he is necessarily to gorge himself like a mastiff with sheep’s paunch.  On the contrary, if he means to preserve the powers of his palate intact, he must “live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”  The fat-witted people in the City are not nice in their eating, quantity being more closely considered by them than quality.  There is, I admit, something in the good man’s concluding conjecture, that “the sort of diet men observe influences their style.”  I should know an “heavy-wet” man at the third line; and I can tell to a nicety when Theodore Hook writes upon claret, and when he is inspired by the over-heating and acrimonious stimulus of Max.  Hayley obviously composed upon tea and bread and butter.  Dr. Philpots may be nosed a mile off for priestly port and the fat bulls of Basan; and Southey’s Quarterly articles are written on an empty stomach, and before his crudities, like the breath of Sir Roger de Coverley’s barber, have been “mollified by a breakfast.”—­New Monthly Mag.