——­I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at them.  “Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?” I would say to myself.  Then I would remember My Lady in “Marriage a la Mode,” and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing in Hogarth’s time and in our own.  But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at my window.  By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at.  And now I should like to ask, WHO taught him all this?—­and me, through him, that the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its shoulders?

——­Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions?  A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any mineralogical collection.  One little fluid particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!

——­Weaken moral obligations?—­No, not weaken, but define them.  When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary.  You saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very apt to be fools and cowards.  But a great many of the clergyman’s patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table.—­Sudden retirement of the angular female in oxydated bombazine.  Movement of adhesion—­as they say in the Chamber of Deputies—­on the part of the young fellow they call John.  Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite’s lower jaw—­(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him).  Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,—­Go to school right off, there’s a good boy!  Schoolmistress curious,—­takes a quick glance at divinity-student.  Divinity-student slightly flushed; draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood—­or truth—­had hit him in the forehead.  Myself calm.]

——­I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit should be disputed.  Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin, (for B.F. had not gone right off, of course,) and bring down a small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?

[Look at the precious little black, ribbed-backed, clean-typed, vellum-papered 32mo.  “DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA.  Amstelodami.  Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650.”  Various names written on title-page.  Most conspicuous this:  Gul.  Cookeson:  E. Coll.  Oum.  Anim. 1725.  Oxon.