to read that old classic "Grand mérite, but suprême de la critique: inspirer l'envie de lire et de relire les maîtres." And so again in the instance of M. Lefèvre and Fénelon: "Pour ma part," exclaims M. de Sacy, "je sais gré à M. Lefèvre de m'avoir fourni l'occasion de relire le Télémaque, bien qu'à vrai dire il ne me faille pas d'occasions très-pressantes pour relire un bon livre. Un prétexte me suffit. Je me passerais même de pretextes." One is reminded, however, of Macaulay's being fain, at the close of his Boswell essay, to part in good humour with even Mr. Wilson Croker, as the editor who, ill as he, on his adversary's showing, had performed his task, had at least this claim to that adversary's gratitude-that he of the Quarterly had induced him of the Edinburgh to read Boswell's book again.

ABOUT THE WHITE HAIRS THAT COME OF CARE OR TERROR.

THERE was villanous news abroad, Falstaff had one day to tell Prince Hal-who ought not, being his father's son, and the kingdom's heir, to have first heard it from such a quarter-news had reached the court of an alliance in rebellion between "that mad fellow of the north, Percy," and Owen Glendower, and "that sprightly Scot of Scots, that runs o' horseback up a hill perpendicular," and one Mordake, and a thousand blue-caps more: Worcester, adds Sir John, in his exciting narrative, "is stolen away to-night; thy father's beard is turned white with the news."

If the hyperbolical knight, in his rhetorical way, said the thing that was not, he yet said nothing but what might have been. Such sudden changes of colour in hair and beard are a common-place in world-wide biography; while the more gradual but still premature conversion of black and brown to white or grey, is of course a greatly more common experience:

Danger, long travel, want or woe,

Soon change the form that best we know

For deadly fear can time outgo,
And blanch at once the hair.

Care does its bleaching work at comparative leisure, by a chronic process: it anticipates time, but it takes its own time in doing so. Whereas terror attacks in the acute, not chronic, form; effecting its wicked will by one midnight frost, at one fell swoop. In citing variegated illustrations and exemplifications of either process, let us take the milder and slower one first.

Chaucer writes, in a rather obscure passage, that

-Who that getteth of love a little blisse,

But if he be alway therewith ywis,
He may ful soone of age have his haire.

He may

Which the commentators take to mean, full soon have the hair which belongs to age," scil. grey hair, the proverbial product of anxiety, and of what Wordsworth finely calls those "shocks of passion:"

That kill the bloom before its time;
And blanch, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.

Still more effective is, or should be, the blanching process, when not without the owner's crime; as in the case, for instance, of Southey's Roderick-the Royal Goth, sunk was whose eye of sovereignty, and on whose emaciate cheek had penitence and anguish deeply drawn their furrows premature,

-forestalling time,

And shedding upon thirty's brow more snows
Than threescore winters in their natural course
Might else have sprinkled there.

Didactic Doctor Armstrong, physician as well as poet-or, at any rate, physician, if not poet-warns in blank verse against the penalties of wild debauch, one result of which is to bring about "that incurable disease, old age, in youthful bodies more severely felt." For know, he says, whate'er beyond its natural fervour hurries on the sanguine tide,

-spurs to its last stage tired life,

And sows the temples with untimely snow.

Another didactic doctor of the same generation, James Beattie, commemorates for no such reason the premature winter that crowned his own brow,

Where cares long since have shed untimely snow.

The cause, in his instance, was of the kind suggested in a poem of Mr. Matthew Arnold's, referring to loss of wife or child,

And grievous is the grief for these:
This pain alone, which must be borne,
Makes the head white, and bows the knees.

Many a younger poet than Dr. Beattie has left the like personal memorial of untimely grey hairs. Shelley seems to have pictured himself under more than one semblance:

There was a youth, who as with toil and travel,
Had grown quite weak and grey before his time.

In another of his poems he speaks of "a killing air, which pierced like honey-dew into the core of my green heart, and lay upon its leaves

——until, as hair grown grey

O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown pride
With ruins of unseasonable time."

Hartley Coleridge, as we read in his brother's memoir of him, acquired in early life the gait and general appearance of advanced age: "his once dark, lustrous hair was prematurely silvered, and became latterly quite white." It is no uncommon thing, writes an old friend and neighbour of Hartley's, to see an old man with hair as white as snow; “but never saw I but one-and that was poor Hartley— whose head was mid-winter, while his heart was as

green as May." The miscellaneous poems-the exquisite sonnets especially-of this remarkable man afford frequent references to his grey hairs, and very touching is the sadness they beget in his self-communing spirit:

-Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my

head is grey,

For I have lost the race I never ran:

A rathe December blights my lagging May.

Another sonnet, commencing "Youth, thou art fled," and ending with "I thank my God because my hairs are grey," is followed by one that repeats and italicises that pregnant line:

I thank my God because my hairs are grey !
But have grey hairs brought wisdom ?

VOL. I.

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