“Now Jinny don’t know what she’s talkin’ about,” she would say.  “S’pose he does cough and keep her awake nights, and take a little too much sometimes, a’n’t he better’n no husband at all?  A body wouldn’t seem to hab nuffin to lib for, ef dey hadn’t an ole man to look arter.  Men is nate’lly foolish about some tings,—­but dey’s good deal better’n nuffin.”

And Candace, after this condescending remark, would lift off with one hand a brass kettle in which poor Cato might have been drowned, and fly across the kitchen with it as if it were a feather.

[To be continued.]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England.  Collected and edited by James Spedding, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge; Robert Leslie Ellis, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and Douglas Denon Heath, Barrister-at-Law, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  Vols.  I.-VI.  London:  Longman & Co. 1858.

“For my name and memory,” said Bacon in his will, “I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”  Scarcely was he dead when the first portion of this legacy received some part of its fulfilment in the touching and often quoted words of Ben Jonson:—­“My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place or honors; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been in many ages.  In his adversity, I ever prayed that God would give him strength; for greatness he could not want.  Neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest.”  But it may fairly be doubted whether “the next ages” have done fitly by his memory, spite of the honor that has been indiscriminately lavished upon his name as a philosopher, and the mass of praise, for the most part ignorant, beneath which his works have been buried.  The world of readers has been content to take Bacon’s greatness upon trust, or to form such imperfect idea of it as was to be got from acquaintance with his “Essays,” the only one of his works which has ever attained popularity.  Even more thorough students have, for the most part, satisfied themselves with a general view of Bacon’s philosophy, dwelling on disconnected passages of ample thought or aphoristic wisdom, and rarely attempting to gain an insight into the real character of his system.  Indeed, “the system of Lord Bacon” became a sort of cabalistic phrase.  It meant anything and everything.  It was like the English Constitution, venerable in authority and prescription, interpreted in contradictory methods, and never precisely defined.  Few men undertook to study it with a zeal like that of Homer and his