Caxton's abhorrence. "These thaumata, or wonders, last till when, Mr. Squills?" The richer a nature, says Mr. Carlyle, by way of moral to a fable of his composing, the harder and slower its development. "Two boys were once of a class in the Edinburgh grammar school: John ever trim, precise, and dux; Walter ever slovenly, confused, and dolt. In due time, John became Bailie John of Hunter-square, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott of the Universe." The quickest and completest of all vegetables, Mr. Carlyle pithily adds, is the cabbage.

Mr. Thackeray illustrates in the boyhood of John James Ridley the seeming dunce who will turn out a genius. "At school he made but little progress," and his own father "thought him little better than an idiot," though shrewder Miss Cann prophesies the world will hear of that boy, who has got more wit in his little finger than Ridley senior in all his big person. "That boy half-witted! . . . I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell you that one day the world will hear of him." As it has done. In another and lighter work Mr. Thackeray declares himself— at least, Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh does-to have always had a regard for dunces. Those of his own school-days, he bears record, were amongst the pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest in life; whereas many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, "is no better than a feeble prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his head before his beard grew."

TOUCHSTONE'S VERY OWN.

A Cue from Shakspeare.

THERE is an expressive phrase in use with children, when, flushed with an exultant sense of exclusive ownership, they call a thing their "very own." It rejoices them to be consciously, and confessedly, absolute proprietors. Their personalty is real property. The object in possession may be a mere trifle; a bit of cast-off finery, or a broken toy; but in the fact that it has been made over to them, conveyed to them, authoritatively recognised as theirs, and henceforth to be unconditionally theirs by fee simple-consists a feeling of complacent pride, combined with a growing fondness for this their very own-their own particular.

Identical with this cherished sense of proprietorship is Touchstone's self-assertion as lord and master of Audrey. That most courtly of Shakspearean jesters is half ashamed of himself, perhaps, in having taken to wife so uncouth a rustic. She is hardly presentable to the dukes and nobles with whom he associates. He feels this when introducing her to them, and deprecates adverse criticism on their part,

while privately nudging and whispering the ungainly damsel to "bear her body more seeming," and not look so consummate a boor. Still, there is gratification in his regarding her as his very own. No court beauty, granted; not one of the three Graces, or of the nine Muses. Audrey is a female oaf, lout, clodhopper, of the roughest grain. But for all that, Touchstone has made her his own, and evinces a proper partiality accordingly.

So, to the Duke and his companions in the Forest of Arden, Touchstone's introduction of Audrey is : "A poor virgin, Sir, an ill-favoured thing, Sir, but mine own."

Sua regina regi placet, Juno Jovi, says Plautus. And if Jupiter is pleased with Juno because she is his own, sua,—so is Jack with Jill, John Thomas with Sarah Anne, Touchstone with Audrey. An ill-favoured thing, may be; and that's a pity; but still, his own. Meus mihi suus cuique est carus, says Plautus, in another place.

Touchstone's phrase was a favourite quotation with Sir Walter Scott, as readers of his Life may have noticed. Leslie the painter supplies a corroborative example, in his delightful autobiography. Scott wished that for a background to the portrait Leslie was taking of him, Thomas the Rhymer's Glen, one of his favourite haunts, should be introduced; and he took the artist accordingly to see the spot. "The glen was beautiful," writes the latter; "and as he rested himself in his favourite seat near a little succession of waterfalls, he said, with a

strong emphasis of satisfaction on the two last words, ' a poor thing, but mine own." The phrase appears to have been in use too with the author of "The Rent Day" and "Black-eyed Susan," who of domestic drama was wont to say, "A poor thingbut mine own."

The pride of Mrs. Stowe's Tiff in a singularly composite waggon, of his own construction, is typical enough: the body consisting of a long packing-box -the wheels all odd ones-the shafts hickory poles -the harness, of old ropes--the horse, a gaunt and one-eyed "object." But no millionaire, we are assured, ever enjoyed his luxuriously-cushioned coach with half the relish of Tiff's exultation in his home-made equipage. "It was the work of his hands, the darling of his heart, the delight of his eyes. To be sure, like other mortal darlings, it was to be admitted that it had its weak points and failings" (for instance, the wheels would now and then come off, the shafts get loose, or the harness break ;) -but so had Audrey: a poor virgin, sir; an illfavoured thing, sir; but—and there may be much virtue in a but, as well as many disappointmentsbut, Touchstone's own. Tiff's partiality is only a parallel passage to the poet's couplet about

-one whose story serves at least to show Men loved their own productions long ago.

Not that they always adopt Touchstone's modest tone of deprecation. Some people's. geese are all swans, and they will allow of no trace of a Michael

mas fowl about their peerless bipeds. It is one of the truisms so fluently enunciated and so copiously illustrated by A. K. H. B., that most human beings fancy themselves, and all their belongings, to be quite different from all other beings, and the belongings of all other beings. "I heard an old lady, whose son is a rifleman, and just like all the other volunteers of his corps, lately declare that on the occasion of a certain grand Review, her Tom looked so entirely different from all the rest. No doubt he did to her, poor old lady, for he was her own.'

Even Scott's Antiquary-caustic, sarcastic, satirical Monkbarns-though shrewd and acute enough in estimating the variety of plans formed by others, has a very natural, though rather disproportioned, good opinion of the importance of those which originate with himself: hence the fond stress he lays on the completion, by his young friend Lovel, of an epic to be called "Caledonia" the suggestion merely of the name and subject being due to himself; but that suffices to enlist his paternal pride in its completion: a poor thing, perchance, when (by Lovel) completed, but, as regards the original idea and planning of it, Mr. Oldbuck's very own.

The author of "Adam Bede" makes the Miller on the Floss ask an opinion of his friend Mr. Riley, as

* “But the irritating thing was that the old lady wished it to be admitted that Tom's superiority was an actual fact, equally patent to the eyes of all mankind."-Leisure Hours in Town: Concerning Things Slowly Learnt.