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Is there any thing in this?

“It were no preposterous conceit to affirm, that nature typifies in each individual man the several offices and orders which our commonwealth distributes to the several ranks and functionaries of the state.  There are the Operative Energies, Talents, Passions, Appetites, good servants all, but bad masters, useful citizens, always to be controlled, but never oppressed, and most effective when they are neither pampered nor starved.  There, too, is the Executive Will; Prudence, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Self-love, minister for the Home Department; Observation, Secretary of Foreign Affairs; Poetry, over the Woods and Forests; Lord Keeper Conscience, a sage, scrupulous, hesitating, head-shaking, hair-splitting personage, whose decisions are most just, but too slow to be useful, and who is the readier to weep for what is done, than to direct what should be done; Wit, Manager of the House of Commons, a flashy, either-sided gentleman, who piques himself on never being out; and Self-Denial, always eager to vacate his seat and accept the Chiltern Hundreds.”—­Blackwood’s Mag.

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MAN.

Man is so pugnacious an animal, that even the quakers, who in all other things seem effectually to have subdued this part of their animal nature, carry on controversy, whenever they engage in it, tooth and nail.—­Quarterly Rev.

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RETROSPECTIVE GLEANINGS,

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GLEANINGS ON GLUTTONY.

Against Voracitie and immoderate drinking, instanced by sundry histories.

Vitellius, an Emperour of Rome, was among divers other his notorious vices so luxuriously given, that at one supper he was served with two thousand fishes of divers kindes, and seven thousand flying foules; he was afterward drawne through the streets with a halter about his neck, and shamefully put to death.

But what shall we wonder at emperours prodigalities, when of later yeares a simple Franciscan frier, Peter de Ruere, after hee had attained to the dignitie of cardinall by the favour of the pope, his kinsman, hee spent in two yeares, in which he lived at Rome, in feasts and banquets, two hundred thousand crownes, besides his debts, which were as much more.

In our time Muleasses, King of Tunis, was so drowned in pleasures, that being expelled from his kingdome for his vices, after his returne from Germanie, being denyed of ayd hee sought of the Emperour Charles the Fifth, he spent an hundred crownes upon the dressing of a peacocke for his owne mouth.  And that hee might with more pleasure heare musicke, he used to cover his eyes.—­But the judgment of God fell upon him; for his sone or brother dispossessed