I protest that among law-givers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence.  The ancient Greeks also (though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions, especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the advantage of communication with America.  Now the Greeks had a Muse of Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more excellent Muse of Leaving-off.  The Spartans, I suspect, found her out and kept her selfishly to themselves.  She were indeed a goddess to be worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day.  I ask you to compare Plutarch’s lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts and zeroes.  Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity.  Yet the evils of print are as dust in the balance to those of speech.

We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.  There are now two debating-clubs, seminaries of multiloquence.  A few of us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it “The Jolly Oysters.”  No member is allowed to open his mouth except at high-tide by the calendar.  We have biennial festivals on the evening of election-day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure on its Representative elect by sending a baker’s dozen of orators to congratulate him.

But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,—­like Carlyle, who has talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue.  And yet something should be done about it.  Even when we get one orator safely under-ground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue.  I go to listen:  we all go:  we are under a spell.  ’Tis true, I find a casual refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called Sleep the child of Silence.  Speech begets her as often.  But there is no sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let there be written on my headstone, with impartial application to these Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our equestrian statues,—­

Os sublime did it!

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenus inedita.  Vol.  I, Containing, I. Opus Tertium,—­II. Opus Minus,—­III. Compendium Philosophiae.  Edited by J.S.  BREWER, M.A., Professor of English Literature, King’s College, London, and Reader at the Rolls.  Published by the Authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, under the Direction of the Master of the Rolls.  London:  Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. 1859. 8vo. pp. c., 573.