teacher's exhortation. There is a genuine ring about such as the following: "Work every hour, paid or unpaid; see only that you work, and you cannot escape your reward. Whether your work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to your own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought. No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."

III.

MUTUAL-ADMIRATION SOCIETIES.

"We had experience of a blissful state,
In which our powers of thought stood separate,
Each in its own high freedom held apart,
Yet both close folded in one loving heart;
So that we seemed, without conceit, to be
Both one, and two, in our identity."

MILNES.

"Genius without sympathetic recognition is like a kindled fire without flue or draught; it smoulders miserably away instead of leaping, sparkling, and giving cheer."-BAYARD TAYLOR.

"Gaze thou in the face of thy brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of kindness. feel how thy own so quiet soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame and then say what miraculous virtue goes out of man into man."-CARLYLE.

NOTHING tends more to lay a man's soul bare than to have a sympathetic listener or two. The world's cold

criticism is all forgotten in the presence of friendly hearts and answering eyes. These conditions are often found by the world's workers in select_clubs,* where man meets man without formality or restraint of any kind; where he expects to find, and generally does find, in his brother something admirable and charming. And "if they are men

* To attempt to exhaust the subject of clubs in a little book like the present would, it need hardly be said, prove something akin to gathering the hills together to stow in a barn. Volumes might be written in this direction, and yet much would be left unrecorded. To start even with the picture of an evening at the Globe with Kit Marlowe (alas, poor Kit!" Christopher Marlowe, slain by a serving-man in a drunken brawl, aged twentynine") and Shakespeare, Cowley and Green, Ned Alleyn, George Peele, Nash, and the rest of the merry crew, all in a storm of inspiration and drink, would open up untold chapters in the literary history of England.

And this, notwithstanding Charlotte Brontë's opinion on the matter. All coteries," she says in one of her letters, "whether they be literary, scientific, political, or religious, must, it seems to me, have a tendency to change truth into affectation. When people belong to a clique, they must, I suppose, in some measure, write, talk, think, and live for that clique-a harassing and narrowing necessity."

with noble powers and qualities, let me tell you that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the societies of mutual admiration. And what would literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson and Goldsmith, and Burke and Reynolds, and Beauclerk and Boswell, most admiring among all admirers, met together ?*

* "Who has not heard of the famous lobster suppers of Pope, and the witty re-unions at Tom's Coffee House, where ruffled and rapiered gallants met to discuss liquor and literature, chat and claret? or, who has not longed to make one of such a party as that described, or rather referred to, by the sprightly Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who, with chosen associates,

"When the cares of the day are all pass'd

Sit down with champagne and a chicken at last ;'

Was there any great harm in the fact that the Irvings and Pauld

and to what was far better,' the feast of reason and the flow of soul.' These 'long-ago' affairs have had their Boswells to chronicle them; and so graphic are some of the reports of these symposia, that we seem, whilst perusing them, to ' live over each scene.' In imagination we jostle against flower-brocaded coats and embroidered vests; our modern legs get entangled in the voluminous folds of the ample fardingales and hoops, and high heels startle us with their grotesque proportions.

"The times have changed; the days of the blue-stocking clique are remembered as among the things that were. Hannah More, Mrs. Delaney, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Piozzi, and Madame D'Arblay no longer sit sipping their souchong, and listening to the oracular and ponderous sentences of Doctor Johnson, or indulging in sprightly sentimentalisms, or flippant nothings. Will's coffee-house is no longer open to the Steeles, the Addisons, and the rest of the town wits. Tom's exists, but is a lawyer's dining-house. Ranelagh, with its variegated leafy arcades, and brilliantly-lighted bowers, is no more; and all who gossiped so delightfully, or talked so learnedly, a few years ago, have passed away, leaving legacies of wit, wisdom and folly to their descendants, who, in the cockney haunts of Rosherville and Cremorne, make up for the almost forsaken glories of Vauxhall—that latest remnant of old-fashioned gaiety.

"The times have greatly changed. Club-houses have knocked the old coffee-houses into nothingness; and literary coteries are broken up-such literary coteries, we mean, as the days to which reference has been made could boast of."-Dix's Lions Living and Dead.