Snarling never misses an opportunity of pointing out to you the dulness of your situation, the inconvenience of your dwelling, the inferiority of the place you hold in life to what you might à priori have anticipated. You are quite light-hearted when Mr. Snarling enters; but when he goes, you cannot help feeling a good deal depressed. The blackest side of things has been pressed on your notice during his stay. I do not think this is entirely the result of malice. It is ignorance of the right way to face little worries. The man has got a habit of looking only at the dunghill. Would that he could learn better sense! are always ready to drop hints of what they think will be disagreeable for you to hear. Such are the men who will walk round your garden, when you show it to them in the innocent pride of your heart: and after having accomplished the circuit, will shrug their shoulders, snuff the air, and say nothing. Such are the men who will call upon an old gentleman, and incidentally mention that they were present the other Sunday when his son preached his first sermon, but say no kindly word as to the figure made by the youthful divine. Such are the men who, when you show them your fine new church, will walk round it hurriedly, say, carelessly, Let me here remark a certain confusion "Very nice;" and begin to talk earnestly which exists in the minds of many. I have upon topics not connected with ecclesiastical known persons. who prided themselves on architecture. And such, as a general rule, their ability to inflict pain on others. They are all the envious race, who will never corthought it a proof of power. And no doubt dially praise any thing done by others, and to scarify a man as Luther and Milton did, who turn green with envy and jealousy if they as Croker, Lockhart, and Macaulay did, is a even hear others speak of a third party in proof of power. But sometimes people inflict words of cordial praise. Such men are for the pain on others simply by making themselves most part underbred, and always of third or disgusting; and to do this is no proof of fourth-rate talent. A really able man heartpower. No doubt you may severely pain a ily speaks well of the talent that rivals or refined and cultivated man or woman by re-eclipses his own. He does so through the volting vulgarity of language and manner. necessity of a noble and magnanimous naYou may, Mrs. Bouncer, embitter your poor ture. And a gentleman will generally do as governess' life by your coarse, petty tyranny; and you may infuriate your servants by talking at them before strangers at table. But let me remind you that there is a dignified and an undignified way of inflicting pain. There are what may be called the active and the passive ways. You may inflict annoyance as a viper does; or you may inflict annoyance as a dunghill does. Some men (sharp critics belong to this class) are like the viper. They actively give pain. You are afraid of them. Others again are like a dunghill. They are merely passively offensive. You are disgusted at these. Now the viperish man may perhaps be proud of his power of stinging; but the dunghill man has no reason earthly to be proud of his power of stinking. It is just that he is an offensive object, and men would rather get out of his way. Yet I have heard a blockhead boast how he had driven away a refined gentleman from a certain club. No doubt he did. The gentleman never could go there without the blockhead offensively revolting him. The blockhead told the story with pride. Other blockheads listened and expressed their admiration of his cleverness. I looked in the blockhead's face, and inwardly said, O you human dunghill! Think of a filthy sewer boasting, "Ah, I can drive most people away from me!" To the dunghill class many men belong. Such, generally, are those who will never heartily say any thing pleasant; but who much, through the influence of a training which makes the best of the best features in the character of man. It warms one's heart to hear a great and illustrious author speak of a young one who is struggling up the slope. But it is a sorry thing to hear Mr. Snarling upon the same subject. I have sometimes wondered whether what is commonly called coolness in human beings is the result of a remarkable power of looking away from things which it is not thought desirable to see; or of a still more remarkable power of looking at disagreeable things and not minding. You remember somewhere in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, we are told of a certain joyous dinner-party at his house in Castle Street. Of all the gay party there was none so gay as a certain West Country baronet. Yet in his pocket he had a letter containing a challenge which he had accepted; and next morning early he was off to the duel in which he was killed. Now, there must have been a woful worry guawing at the clever man's heart, you would say. How did he take it so coolly? Did he really forget for the time the risk that lay before him? Or did he look fairly at it, yet not care? He was a kind-hearted man as well as a brave one: surely, he must have been able, through the jovial evening, to look quite away from the possibility of a distracted widow, and young children left fatherless. Sometimes this coolness appears in base and sordid forms: it is then the result T CONCERNING THE of obtuseness of nature,-of pure lack of discernment and feeling. People thus qualified are able with entire composure to do things which others could not do to save their lives. Such are the people who constitute a class which is an insufferable nuisance of civilized society,-the class of uninvited and unwelcome guests. I am thinking of people who will without any invitation push themselves and their baggage into the house of a man who is almost a stranger to them; and in spite of the studied presentation of the cold shoulder, and in spite of every civil hint that their presence is most unwelcome, make themselves quite at home for so long as it suits them to remain. I have heard of people who would come, to the number of three or four, to the house of a poor gentleman to whom every shilling was a consideration; and without invitation remain for four, six, ten weeks at a stretch. I have heard of people who would not only come uninvited to stay at a small house, but bring with them some ugly individual whom its host had never seen, and possibly a mangy dog in addition. And such folk with great freedom drink the wine, little used by that plain household, and hospitably press the ugly individual to drink it freely too. I declare there is something that approaches the sublime in the intensity of such folk's stolidity. They will not see that they are not wanted. They jauntily make themselves quite at home. If they get so many weeks' board and lodging, they don't care how unpleasantly it is given. They will write for your carriage to meet them at the railway station, as if they were ordering a hackney-coach. This subject, however, is too large to be taken up here: it must have an entire essay to itself. But probably my reader will agree with me in thinking that people may possess in an excessive degree the valuable power of looking away from what they don't wish to see. And yet and yet-do you not feel that it is merely by turning our mind's eye away from many thoughts which are only too intrusive, that you can hope to enjoy much peace or quiet in such a world as this? How any could you feel relish for the comforts of WORRIES OF LIFE. and watching each morsel they ate with Archbishop Whately, in treating of this great difficulty, suggests the idea that in a higher state the soul may have the power of as decidedly turning the thoughts away from a painful subject as we now have of turning the eyes away from a disagreeable sight. I thought of these things this afternoon in It was a frozen enter into the pinched and poverty-stricken a gay and stirring scene. lot of others? You do not like, when you | lake of considerable extent, lying in a beaulay yourself down at night on your quiet tiful valley, at the foot of a majestic hill. bed, to think of the poor wretch in the condemned cell of the town five miles off, who will meet his violent death to-morrow in the dismal drizzling dawn. Some, I verily believe, will not sympathize with the feeling. There are persons, I believe, who could go on quite comfortably with their dinner with a starving beggar standing outside the window The lake was covered with people, all in a state of high enjoyment: scores of skaters were flying about, and there was a roaring of curling-stones like the distant thunder that was heard by Rip van Winkle. The sky was blue and sunshiny; the air crisp and clear; the cliffs, slopes, and fields around were fair with untrodden snow; but still one could not quite exclude the recollection that the heel of the boot too deep; you may this brisk frost, so bracing and exhilarating penetrate to something more sensitive than to us, is the cause of great suffering to mul- leather. Screw in; buckle the straps, but titudes. The frost causes most outdoor work not too tight; and now we are on our feet, to cease. No building, no fieldwork, can go with the delightful sense of freedom to fly forward, and so the frost cuts off the bread about in any direction with almost the from many hungry mouths; and fireless smooth swiftness of a bird. Come, my rooms and thin garments are no defence friend, let us be off round the lake, with against this bitter chill. Well, you would long strokes, steadily, and not too fast. We never be cheerful at all but for the blessed may not be quite like Sidney's Arcadian gift of occasional forgetfulness! Those who shepherd-boy, piping as if he never would have seen things too accurately as they are, grow old; yet let us be like kindly skaters, have always been sorrowful even when un- forgetting, in the exhilarating exercise that soured men. Here, you man (one of six or quickens the pulse and flushes the cheek, seven eager parties with chairs and gimlets), that there are such things as evil and worry put on my skates. Don't bore that hole in in this world! A. K. H. B. COLORING OF ADULTERATED WINES.-Although many experiments have been instituted by chemists for the detection of the coloring matters employed in adulterated wines, so as to be able to distinguish the true from the false, no very positive results have yet been arrived at, because the color of genuine wine itself changes with age, and because the same colors can be imitated by various substances, all of which possess nearly the same elements when analyzed. It is believed that some of the cheap claret wines contain alum and sulphuric acid, and the chemist Lassaigne has lately called attention to the addition of about 0.33 per cent of sulphuric acid which he had detected (but with some difficulty) in French clarets. An easy method of detecting alum, acids, logwood, cider, tannin, and other mixtures used in the adulteration of wines is a great desideratum; chemists have not yet made the discovery.-Scientific American. tion to neighbors' children learning music and singing-quite the reverse; but it is most objectionable that walls should so readily transmit sound, and render the ladies' efforts so widely known. Some persons always take a corner house, so as to be free from such nuisance on one side at least. Is there no remedy? The late Mr. Cubbitt had some trouble at Balmoral with certain floors, and remembered in taking down an old palace floor (many years before), vast quantities of cockle-shells fell out from betwixt the joists. These had been used in plugging. The idea was acted upon. Cockles were dredged, and brought; the shells were cleaned and dried, and used, with beneficial effect. The cellular spaces thus produced absorbed sound. Some highly cellular texture may be applied to walls, ceilings, and floors, which shall resist fire and or dinary decay, allow of finish, and yet deaden sound. Who is to invent and introduce such materials? They may patent the invention and make a fortune, if they will only abate the exDEADENING WALLS AND CEILINGS.-Men|isting nuisance, and enable us to have solid partiof ingenuity, lend us your ears. There is no greater nuisance in modern houses than that of the transmission of sound through parti-walls. Any practical, inexpensive, and efficient means of deadening sound will be a great boon. Solid walls and solid floors transmit sound in the high- SOME observations of a singular character est degree. The Metropolitan Building Act pro- have lately been made upon the growth of that vides that all parti-wall shall be solid and of a remarkable and useful production of the east, certain thickness in proportion to height and the bamboo. A plant in the Royal Botanical length. How is the evil to be overcome? "For Gardens of Edinburgh, grew, under a temperaeight years," writes a studious friend to us, ture of from 65° to 70°, six inches daily-a "I have occupied a house in London; and, dur- specimen of the Bambusa gigantea of Burmah, ing the whole of this time, there have been neigh- which ranks as the monarch of the species, inbors having young families. They are musical, creased eighteen inches in twenty-four hours. and, I must confess, labor most industriously at The Bambusa tulda of Bengal attains its full the scales; morning, noon, and night one or height of seventy feet in about a month, thus other child howls and strums, apparently with-growing at the astonishing rate of an inch an out making any progress." There is no objec- hour. walls and fireproof floors without being compelled to hear what is going on up-stairs and in the next house.-The Builder. From The Christian Observer. THEODORE PARKER AND THE OXFORD ESSAYISTS.* instance of this kind will presently come 1. Theodore Parker's Experience as a MinisHe appears to have been the son of a New ter. London. Whitfield. 1860. 2. Essays and Reviews. London. Parker England farmer, and to have been born about the year 1810; his "relatives and and Son. 1860. (Second Notice.) A MAN of some note has recently been neighbors, all hard-working people, living in taken from the world. Theodore Parker, one of the most laborious communities in "the celebrated," according to some,-"the notorious," according to others,-died at Florence in the month of May, 1860. His last injunctions were characteristic. He was to be carried to the grave and interred in silence, without service, prayer, exhortation, or eulogy, a Unitarian minister merely reading over his grave the first eleven verses of the fifth chapter of St. Matthew's gospel. These instructions were obeyed; and we thus part with a remarkable man; not silently, however, for he himself has imposed a duty upon us. Shortly before his departure, he remitted to his late congregation in Boston, N. E., a long letter, of the nature of an autobiography-an "experience," which has just been re-published in England, and on which it will be our duty to make some remarks. the world." (P. 6.) He was, he tells us, The slavery, too, in which the voluntary Theodore Parker was, in a peculiar sense and in an unusual degree, what his friend Emerson calls "a representative man.' Coming forth, about twenty years ago, an unknown youth, from a New England village, he became, before his death, the foremost man, the prophet and leader of the "New Theology," of that system which is more accurately described as the philosophical infidelity of our day. This is true of him to a greater degree than even his followers would like to confess. He was a bold, outspoken man, and fearlessly uttered, with unhesitating speech, doctrines which numbers of his less courageous followers in their hearts believe, but which they fear to avow. are hundreds, perhaps thousands, in England, some of them ordained ministers of our church, others, pastors of dissenting congregations, who hold in substance what Theodore Parker held, but who could not easily be brought to acknowledge such a participation. Their positions in life, the obligations into which they have entered, and the painful consequences which would be likely to follow an honest profession, are circumstances which abundantly account for, if they do not justify, this concealment of the extent of their unbelief. One notable There [* It seems almost necessary to copy this conclusion of the article in The Living Age, No. 844. We hope that every denomination incidentally touched by the reviewer, will bear its share as well as we bear the attack upon the Church of England.] 529 LIVING AGE. THIRD SERIES. then!'"-P. 7. To a penetrating, masculine intellect, too, and a mind not yet inured to controversial immoralities, the "unnaturalness" and unreality of the Unitarian theology was likely to prove exceedingly repulsive. Theodore Parker afterwards said, in his Discourse on Religion, that "If the Athanasin Creed, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Bull Unigenitus, could be found in a Greek manuscript, and be proved to be the work of an inspired apostle, no doubt Unitarianism would explain all three, and deny that they taught man!"-P. 357. the doctrine of the Trinity or the fall of At the outset of life, then, the characters and circumstances of Thomas Scott and of Theodore Parker were nearly alike. Both had parents of masculine and penetrating intellects; both were bemired in the Socinian slough. But, as Bunyan shows us at the of the mire on the heavenward side, another beginning of his story,-one man gets out on the earthward. Thomas Scott was led by the Divine Spirit onward and upward; while poor Theodore Parker was repelled by Unitarianism, and fell backward into positive infidelity. He describes, in the narra lunatic asylum, who proceeded to deal with the inmates without the least reference to their mental disorders; or of a governor who set to work to clear his prisons, from mere good-nature, without remembering that the inmates were thieves and murderers? Yet neither of these irrational persons would commit a greater absurdity than the man who could speak or think of mankind, without taking the least notice of the existence of Sin! But on this point we shall presently have to remark more at length. tive now before us, how he first got rid of view? What should we say of a physician, "the ghastly doctrine of eternal damnation called to the absolute government of a vast and a wrathful God,"-then, of the doctrine of the Trinity, then, of "a belief in the supernatural birth of Jesus of Nazareth,"then, of the miracles of the Old and New Testament;"some were clearly impossible, others ridiculous, and a few were wicked." Next, "he had no belief in the plenary, infallible, verbal inspiration of the whole Bible, and strong doubts as to the miraculous inspiration of any part of it." (P. 11.) Such was the opening of his life, before he went into a theological school. Here he began more and more to study the subject, and disliking law as a profession, began to set himself to find out, that he might afterwards teach, a religion of his own fashioning. And the result, he tells us, of long and assiduous study carried him just as far as the second chapter of the epistle to the Romans. He says: I found certain great primal intuitions of Human Nature. 1. The instinctive intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is a God. "2. The instinctive intuition of the Just and Right; a consciousness that there is a moral law, independent of our will, which we ought to keep. "3. The instinctive intuition of the Immortal; a consciousness that the essential element of man, the principle of individuality, never dies.-P. 15. Now these great immutable principles, to which, he tells us, the intuitions of human nature bear witness, are all placed by St. Paul at the opening of his argument. They are plainly and broadly stated,-1. Romans i. 19, 20; 2. Romans ii. 14, 15; 3. Romans ii. 5-9. But what right had poor Theodore Parker to stop hei? What right had he to shut his eyes to another "intuition of human nature, which met his gaze at every turn? Whether he studied the histories of ages and nations long since gone by, or the thoughts and feelings of man in a state of heathenism now, how could he avoid seeing, except by resolving not to see, the prevalence of an "intuition" in all ages, and in all parts of the earth,-that man was a sinner; that God was an offended God; and that a propitiation was needed, to make peace between the two? Or, supposing that he had, by the most violent strain upon his conscience, resolved to ascribe all this to "priestcraft," what right had he to drop out of his system altogether, the great, all-important fact of Sin itself, now defiling all parts of God's earth with blood and tears, and to leave the future consequences, and the possibility of a cure or extirpation of this grand evil, wholly out of Having thus discovered for himself, as a creed of his own, that first step to truth which St. Paul places at the beginning of his argument, but which stops.short of a solution of the grand problem, poor Theodore Parker resolved to go no further. His "intuition of the just and right" was to serve him for a religion. And it was not long before he gave the most potent proof of the lamentable insufficiency of this new rule. With "conscience," or "the intuition of the just and right," for his guide, he began to assail the faith and doctrine of nine-tenths of the professedly Christian world, in the following fashion: He told his hearers, that "The Protestant minister, on the authority of an anonymous Greek book" (meaning the New others to believe, that man is born totally deTestament) "will believe, or at least command praved, and that God will perpetually slaughter men in hell by the million, though they had committed no fault, except that of not believing an absurd doctrine they had never heard of."-P. 31. Thus, this professedly honest and sincere inquirer, who had resolved at last to enthrone conscience, or "the instinctive intuition of the just and right," as the alone arbiter of his faith, lost no time in showing us the real value of this his chosen guide. He had never heard this doctrine, as stated above, preached by any living man. He had never read it in any existing or forgotten book. No such doctrine ever had been preached or promulgated, by any human being. Yet this professed follower of " science" finds no difficulty in writing down, revising, and committing to the press, this wicked falsehood; even in a book which was composed with the open grave immediately in view! He thus does us one important service. He shows us what sort of a religion, what sort of a code of morals, the admirers of "the instinctive intuition of the just and right" would substitute, in lieu of God's revealed and written law. con Theodore Parker knew full well, at the very moment when he was penning this calumny, that the doctrine actually held by those "Protestant ministers" whom he was |