sees and hears force him to give vent to the glorious agony which swells his breast: "The sweetness hath his heart ypierced so, He cannot stint of singing by the way." He has no choice in the matter; the crown will find out David while he tends his flocks; the javelin hurled at him will quiver harmless in the wall. There is such a thing as peculiarity of temperament, and you shall not find one of the thousand crafts in which men are employed but has one of its own. How came Mr. Putnam to be delivering that very oration? JOHN. I will propose to you another question equally easy of solution. How comes it that Italians have a patent-right to suffer by convulsions of nature? Yet such is the fact. Let there be an eruption of Cotopaxi or Hecla, let the earth turn in its sleep and shake itself in the Society Islands, and in less than a week an Italian shall thrust into your hand a certificate, properly authenticated, that he has lost his all by one of them. How does it chance, also, that these true pensioners of nature (for they undoubtedly get a living that way, benevolence serving as a kind of insurance-policy) have always large families of children? You speak of nature's providence in her endowment of the bobolink and the swan; but what is it in comparison with the forethought she employs to the furnishment of these? An eruption is a year's support to them; an earthquake more destructive than common is a life-annuity. Whenever she is about to touch a match to one of her underground magazines, she sets them down just over it; she saves them from the destructive wrath of the explosion, and then supplies them with some means of locomotion to the abodes of the charitable which transcends any swiftness of man's device. Before the news of the catastrophe, they are at our doors. This peculiar gift of that nation may perhaps be yet turned to account in the forwarding of despatches. It is worth considering, at least. Again, how comes it to pass that none but destitute Irishmen are ever desirous of obtaining the means of reaching equally destitute wives and children at Halifax, and that they are sometimes years in performing that desolate and pious pilgrimage, being inexplicably detained for months in any village where there are believing ears and generous hearts? Some philosophers will have it that the tools of every animal and vegetable are the forced productions of selfpreserving instinct; that the grape-vine was set to climb the tree till its despair had escaped in prehensile tendrils, that the duck was tossed into the sea to drown till its fears had found a vent and a remedy in webbing its feet. Was it some such instinct which provided the emigrant Switzer with that natural excrescence of his tyrannous, indefatigable, tax-gathering barrel-organ ? PHILIP. I see that you are weary of our discussion. Let me put in two more pieces of evidence, before the case goes to the jury. They are the depositions of Edmund Spenser and James Thomson. The first testifies to this effect: "O, what avails it of immortal seed He gives the same testimony more at full in his "Mother Hubbard's Tale." explicit : Nor is the other less "To every labor its reward accrues, And they are sure of bread who swink and moil; But while the laws not guard that noblest toil, Ne for the Muses other meed decree, They praised are alone, and starve right merrily." JOHN. Now let us open Ford's Plays, which, I see, is the volume in your hand. PHILIP. Ford's dramatic abilities have, I think, been rated too highly. He has a great deal of tragic excitability and enthusiasm, and a good knowledge of stage-effect; but these are the predominant qualities of his nature. In the strong mind they are always subservient. Ford can see the proprie ties and beauties of a fine situation; but he has not that dignity in him which can create them out of its own substance. His poetic faculty leans upon the tragic element in his stories for support, instead of being the foundation of it. Tender and graceful he always is, almost to excess; never great and daring. He does not seem to me to deserve the high praise which, if I remember rightly, Lamb bestows upon him, and which other less judicious critics have repeated. JOHN. The sweet lovingness of Lamb's nature fitted him for a good critic; but there were knotty quirks in the grain of his mind, which seemed, indeed, when polished by refined studies, little less than beauties, and which we cannot help loving, but which led him to the worship of strange gods, and with the more scrupulous punctuality that the mass were of another persuasion. No field is so small or so barren, but there will be grazing enough in it to keep a hobby in excellent case. Lamb's love was of too rambling and wide-spreading a kind to be limited by the narrow trellises which satisfy a common nature. It stretched out its feelers and twined them around everything within its reach, clipping with its tender and delicate green the fair tree and the unsightly stump alike. Everything that he loved was, for the time, his ideal of loveliEven tobacco, when he was taking leave ness. of it, became the very "crown of perfumes," and he affirmed "Roses and violets but toys PHILIP. In this, and in the finer glimpses of his humor, and in the antique richness of his style in its best parts, he reminds me of Emerson; but he had not the divine eye of our American poet, nor his deep transparency and majestic simpleness of language, full of images that seem like remembrance-flowers dropped from between the pages of Bacon, or Montaigne, or Browne, or Herbert; reminding us of all felicitous seasons in our own lives, and yet infused with a congenial virtue from the magic leaves between which they had been stored. — John Ford, though he cannot rank with the first order of minds, yet claims an instinctive deference, as one of that glorious brotherhood who so illustrated and dignified our English tongue at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Set beside almost any of our modern dramatists, there is certainly something grand and free about him; and though he has not that "large utterance" which belonged to Shakspeare, and perhaps one or two others of his contemporaries, he sometimes rises into a fiery earnestness which falls little short of sublimity, and |