experiments tried on masses of iron and stone; and we can't get them tried, because Christian creatures never will seriously and sufficiently spend money, except to find out the shortest ways of killing each other.' He also suggests that if the money spent in cutting diamonds were spent in cutting rocks instead, we might not only come to know something about the making of diamonds, but in ten years there would be 'no dangerous reef nor difficult harbour round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting,—indeed, a true piece of regalia.' Still, we are able to know our crystals in an imperfect manner, and may find something like a code of morals amongst them, and strange resemblances to human life and conditions. This code is limited but emphatic, consisting of two laws only; the first to be pure, and the second to be well shaped.' Many crystals have this pureness naturally, whilst others have not. The wickedest quartz seems good-natured compared to other things. It is one of the strongest of all crystals, and yet withal, as all strength should be, wonderfully gentle and courteous.' 'There seems to be in some crystals, from the beginning, an unconquerable purity of vital power, and strength of crystal spirit. Whatever dead substance, unacceptant of this energy, comes in their way, is either rejected, or forced to take some beautiful subordinate form; the purity of the crystal remains unsullied, and every atom of it bright with coherent energy. Then the second condition is, that from the beginning of its whole structure a fine crystal seems to have determined that it will be of a certain shape and of a certain size; it persists in this plan, and completes it.' This coherence and symmetry are just what we most miss in human character. There is no distinctness, energy, and balance of faculties. We are, as Jean Paul said, one half giants, and the other half dwarfs, and most of our blurs and imperfections are due to the influence of gold-pieces and medals of honour. With many, even genius is held not to be symmetry and health, but monstrosity and insanity. Look, by way of comparison, at the graceful Hartz-born crystal, which our guide says, in his happy way, is thought to be under the tuition of goblins:

"They work chiefly on the mind of a docile, bluish-coloured, carbonate of lime, which comes out of a grey limestone. The goblins take the greatest possible care of its education, and see that nothing happens to it to hurt its temper: and when it may be supposed to have arrived at the crisis which is, to a well brought-up mineral, what presentation at court is to a young lady, there's no end to its pretty ways of behaving. First it will make itself into pointed darts, as fine as hoar-frost; here it is changed into a white fur, as fine as silk; here into little crowns and circlets, as bright as silver, as if for the gnome princess to wear; here it is in

beautiful

beautiful little plates, for them to eat off; presently it is in towers, which they might be imprisoned in; presently in caves and cells, where they might make nungnomes of themselves, and no gnome ever hear of them more; here is some of it in sheaves, like corn; here some in drifts, like snow; here some in rays, like stars; and, though these are all of them, necessarily, shapes that the mineral takes in other places, they are all taken here with such a grace that you recognise the high caste and breeding of the crystals wherever you meet them; and you know at once they are Hartz-born.'

One half of crystal, as of human imperfection, consists in want of will, all doubt, and repenting, and botching, and retouching, and wondering what it will be best to do next, are vice as well as misery.' Virtue, as our author defines it, is simply straightness of back,' and it is wonderful what lessons we are taught by these diminutive crystals that build up our giant precipices and sublime mountains. It may seem strange to attribute even an analogue of volition to crystals, much less volition itself; but the closer we examine them the more is something like it apparent, for which we can find no more expressive term. This likeness to human conditions is even more apparent amongst stones than amongst plants. All through their struggles the analogy runs, and in a pure crystal striving to retain its form in a bad neighbourhood, returning to it when for a moment triumphant, and again being overcome, and yet again full of energy of action and indomitable perseverance, it is most beautifully seen.

"They are wonderfully like human creatures,-forget all that is going on if they don't see it, however dreadful; and never think what is to happen to-morrow. They are spiteful or loving, and indolent or painstaking, and orderly or licentious, with no thought whatever of the lava or the flood which may break over them any day, and evaporate them into air-bubbles, or wash them into a solution of salts. And you may look at them, once understanding the surrounding conditions of their fate, with an endless interest. You will see crowds of unfortunate little crystals, who have been forced to constitute themselves in a hurry, their dissolving element being fiercely scorched away; you will see them doing their best, bright and numberless, but tiny. Then you will find indulged crystals, who have had centuries to form themselves in, and have changed their mind and ways continually; and have been tired, and taken heart again; and have been sick, and got well again; and thought they would try a different diet, and then thought better of it; and made but a poor use of their advantages after all. And others you will see, who began life as wicked crystals, and then have been impressed by alarming circumstances, and have become converted crystals, and behaved amazingly for a little while, and fallen away again, and ended but discreditably, perhaps even in decomposition; so that one doesn't know what will become of them. And sometimes you will see little child-crystals put to school like school-girls, and made to stand in rows; and sometimes you will see unhappy little child-crystals left to lie about in the dirt, and pick up their living, and learn manners where they can. And sometimes you will see fat crystals eating up thin ones, like great capitalists and little labourers; and politico-economic crystals teaching the stupid ones how to eat each other, and cheat each other; and foolish crystals getting in the way of wise ones; and impatient crystals spoiling the plans of patient ones irreparably, just as things go in this world.'

There is another virtue in crystal-life which we shall be the

last

last to overlook; it is its sanative or healing power. Whereever there are great rock-rents, or radiating dislocations, there the crystal force is most active in all its purity and beauty of structure. It takes to these wounds and heals them with its mightiest energy and serenest beauty. It is like love, divine and human, evoking all the noblest and deepest powers of nature. It is a rebuke to selfishness in its satiric strength of isolation, and nature's own answer, photographed in stone, before man appeared, to all his miserable sophistries about refined selfishness and maudlin philanthropy. It is science correcting scientific method and scientific men, and the dead work of fire prophecying the true pathway of will. Thus we see a rent of Saléve limestone filled up with a red breccia formed of the dust of the torn rock, and cemented by a red crystalline paste, and when the piece is polished you may pass your finger over the wound without so much as feeling the place where a rock, which all the hills of England might have been sunk in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through that whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon it.' A like beautiful crystal-healing was seen in a specimen of black slate from Buet. Pure quartz, in fine threaded crystals, had made the rent a lovely piece of fibrous beauty. Similar examples can be seen almost any day in a ramble on the hills, or a sea-side walk, and suggest whole sermons of morality and political economy.

There is an order of progression even amongst these little elfin creatures. The tendency of all dust is to pass into more permanent and beautiful forms, when the legitimate conditions of crystallisation are supplied. With some it is solution and subsequent evaporation, with others fire, and with some unknown and composite forces. Adjacent bodies may help them or hinder them, as we see in human life. Some want purification, others simply impulse. All dust as such is in a state of elemental war, awaiting its harmonic change and rest, and a true likeness of humanity in its endless complications and feverish strife. To be pure, or whole, there must be a perfect consistency in all parts of a crystal, since the element of separation is the element of death. It can mix up with itself no alien ingredients, or it will be a blur and a blotch. Pure clay, in its highest crystal form, is sapphire; pure sand, in its beautiful parallel lines, and mysterious reflecting powers, becomes opal; common soot, in its filth and dulness, and power of disfigurement, becomes hard, compact, and glitteringly beautiful in the diamond; and water, even when impure, mimics the shapes of the stars and the wondrous petals of flowers. So that for an ounce of slime, which we had by political economy of competition,

competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.' This law of help is the same in human life. Helpfulness and consistency are the two great factors of all individual and national character. There is a human as there is a crystal individuality, which we are not wise to disturb. Let a man assimilate himself. Help him if you can, but do not fling yourself across his path, as though he could take your nature to build with it, instead of getting his form, or base, or impulse from it. If pressure be wanted, let it be at the right time, and resolve, not crush. Each soul has its own possible form, when once its energies are fully aroused, and our common ethical error is in prescribing too strictly what form it shall have. Our human dust is plastic as the elements themselves, and, when once we understand it, we shall cease to botch over it, and let each be beautiful of its kind. All dustethics teach us this, if they teach us anything, that true goodness is beautiful, and that there is no end to the possible symmetries of faculties, feelings, and aspirations. We do not want accident, we do not desire caprice; there is no room for anarchy, or peace for cruelty, or rest for wrong, or beauty for unrighteousness. There is no antagonism between nature and God, or science and the heart. The common dust of the earth teaches us that, and if we will but be reverent, and patient, and teachable, we may lean upon our hearts when our intellects are confounded, and be braced up to heroic duties and even terrible toils when the gold-tipped dust-shafts of satire fly thickest, and our earnestness is mis-translated into folly, our hope into greed, and our genius into crime.

ART.

ART. II.-PROVERBS AND EPIGRAMS ON WINE AND WATER.

1. Αθηναίου Ναυκρατίτου Δεινοσοφισται. (The Literary Feastmakers by Athenæus of Naucratis). Schweighäuser's Edition. 1801.

2. Epigrammata é purioribus Græcæ Anthologic fontibus hausit (Epigrams drawn from the purest fountains of the Greek Anthology: by) J. Edwards, M.A. Londonini: 1825.

3. The Greek Anthology used in the English Public Schools. Translated by G. Burges, A.M. London: H. G. Bohn. 1852.

4. Dictionary of Latin Quotations, Proverbs, Maxims, and Mottoes, Classical, and Medieval: with a Selection of Greek Quotations. Edited by H. T. Riley, B.A. London: H. G. Bohn.

5. A Handbook of Proverbs, comprising an entire Re-publication of Ray's Collection of English Proverbs, with his Additions from Foreign Languages, with large Additions collected by Henry G. Bohn. London: Bohn. 1855.

A

PROVERB, as its name implies, is a word (verbum) or saying which many accept or circulate for their own. To say, as some have done, that it is 'the wisdom of many and the wit of one,' is to miss the essential characteristic of the proverb, which is neither wisdom nor wit-since wise. proverbs are not always witty, nor witty ones always wise, and numbers are neither witty nor wise-but public currency, be the intrinsic value and extrinsic brightness or dulness what they may. And as popularity, more or less diffused, is the specific attribute of the proverb, so pungency, more or less intense, is the cardinal distinction of the epigram. Outside these definitions, proverbs mostly differ from epigrams in lacking that individuality of reference of which the latter are frequently possessed. Both are generally sententious, the proverb from necessity, in order to secure and to retain a place in the popular memory; the epigram from expediency, in order to give a reputation for that wit of which brevity is the soul, or rather the circumstantial sine quá non. Hence epigrams frequently assume the form of verse, since metrical rhythm and (in the modern languages) rhyme are found to lend to the arrowy conception feathers that speed it more swiftly and

surely