promise said painters that if they will shorten our forehead, so that the edge of the hair may seem to be gently resting upon, or commingling with the eyebrows, like a thunder-cloud settling upon the dark mountains, we will pay them a fair per centage for their trouble.

But not only painters but biographers manifest the same ludicrous prejudices, and think it necessary to apologize for, or palliate, their hero's low forehead, much as if it were the vice of gambling or intemperance. Now, had these apologists only taken the pains to ask the hero, in his life-time, how he would desire that trouble to be disposed of, he would have replied in language peculiar to the noble race of low foreheads:

"Tell the world that my forehead was both low and narrow, and that I gloried in the fact, for I consider that and that only a sure physiognomical proof of superior intellect; although I never had the vanity or arrogance to boast of it in public."

I have said that our race is modest, meek, and forbearing. Hence it is that we can so calmly

read the cart-loads of trashy novels to which we have already alluded, and reply to all their petty insinuations and libellous caricatures with only a mild and uncle-Toby-like smile of self-complacency. We are still willing that these ambitious witlings should load the press and overrun the world with fictitious heroes, dressed up with foreheads which are the exact facsimiles of the writer's own; we only laugh at all this. Hitherto we have, in the glorious consciousness of our own rectitude and soundness of mind, calmly borne taunts the most malicious, sneers the most contemptible, content by an eloquent silence to hurl them back into the very throat of their authors, by quietly suffering, in Shakespeare's own self-condemning words,

the scoffs

Which patient merit of the unworthy takes.

How much longer our patience will hold out we cannot say. But we beg people to remember that, somewhere in dim futurity, there may be "a point where forbearance ceases to be a virtue." You may poke the slumbering lion too often! Let no one undertake to predict

the dire results of the contest, when our rage shall be at last aroused, and high forehead and low forehead meet in dreadful war of extermination. Nothing to it has been the long waged battle of the big wigs. We are told that the very hairs of our heads are all numbered; and in that day each one, still looking out valiantly for number one, shall glance with jealous eye upon the numbers of his neighbours. We ardently hope that this unnatural combat may be long postponed, but we of the low foreheads are prepared for it when it must come. We glory in this "head and front of our offending," and cannot long submit to be browbeat as we have been. Let then our antagonists contract their brows in their fear of our wrath, and prepare to "hide their diminished heads," remembering that when it comes to "heaping coals of fire," we have the advantage.

From this to that, from that to this he flies,

Feels music's pulse in all her arteries.

With flash of high-born fancies, here and there

Dancing in lofty measures, and

anon

Creeps on the soft touch of a tender tone,

Whose trembling murmurs, melting in wild airs,

Run to and fro complaining their sweet cares;

Because those precious mysteries that dwell

In music's ravished soul he dare not tell,

But whisper to the world.

Crashawe (from Strada)

TH

HE songs of a nation are like wild flowers pressed, as it were by chance, between the blood-stained As if a man's heart had

pages of history.

paused for a moment in its dusty march, and looked back with a flutter of the pulse and a tearful smile upon the simple peacefulness of happier and purer days, gathering some wayside blossom to remind it of childhood and home, amid the crash of battle or the din of the market Listening to these strains of pastoral music, we are lured away from the records of patriotic frauds, of a cannibal policy which devours whole nations with the refined appetite of a converted and polished Polyphemus who has learned to eat with a silver fork, and never to put his knife in his mouth,—we forget the wars and the false standards of honour which have cheated men into wearing the fratricidal brand of Cain, as if it were but the glorious trace of a dignifying wreath, and hear the rustle of the leaves and the innocent bleat of lambs, and the low murmur of lovers beneath the moon of