happen to receive any money, or win any considerable sum at play, pay off a bill with it the very next morning.

Rule 12.—Adopt as a rule the precept of certain ancient philosophers,-always to treat your friends as if they may one day become your enemies, and your enemies as if they may one day become your friends.

Remark.-Too cold and cautious for me, but wise, especially the first part of it. I never could learn the maxim by heart of treating every one as a knave till I know he is an honest man.

Rule 13.-In your transactions with other men, always calculate on their interests, and never on their good feeling or affection.

Query. Is it not Cicero who says, that he is a lucky man who in his journey through life finds a single friend; but he that finds two friends experiences a good fortune which is perfectly extraordinary?

Rule 14.-Never waste money on eatables or drinkables, or other things which leave nothing to show for your expenditure.

Remark.-There is a vast difference between spending and buying; you cannot be far wrong in

buying a good thing cheap, as it is always money's worth, and may be disposed of again; but I must give up cabs and cigars; as for the latter, it is literally, as Fivebars facetiously calls it, silver(Silva)-smoking.

αιρεσεως,

Rule 15.-Endeavour to act in everything & πçoaupeσews, as Aristotle says; "de proposito," according to Cicero; or on principle, in the language of plain English.

Remark.-I trust I shall never give up reading the classics: old Horace alone is worth all your modern moralists put together.

Rule 16.-Percunctatorem fugito.
Remark.-Nam garrulus idem est.

Rule 17.-Lord Chesterfield tells his son, that it is better to establish an intrigue with a married woman than to frequent the society of courtezans. If a man must do either one or the other, this may be true; do not, however, let economy be one of your motives for this, as you will be mistaken; it is sure to cost you more.

Illustration.The Countess d'Almaine made me take twenty tickets, at ten francs each, the other day, for a concert given by one of her protegés.

Rule 18.-Entertain the greatest possible con

tempt for the opinion of the world, and exhibit towards it the greatest possible deference.

Rule 19.-Wherever the utile and the honestum are placed in opposition to each other, choose the honestum in preference to the utile.

Query.-If, in driving on a country road at night, you find a turnpike-gate left open in your way, ought you to go through without paying, or to knock up the toll-keeper out of his sleep in order to give him a halfpenny, and break his night's rest?

Rule 20.-If you don't like these rules, consult those which Polonius gives his son Laertes in Hamlet, which will do quite as well.

Remark. It has been the fashion, amongst late critics, to consider the speech of Polonius as "the commonplace and barren prosing of a garrulous old gentleman," and such is represented as having been the intention of the poet. I don't believe that Shakspeare designed so much finesse. In Germany, so far from its being generally regarded as a piece of inane and superficial dogmatism, it is in everybody's mouth as a complete manual of worldly wis dom, and I never found a German student yet who did not know it by heart.

Such were some of the rules of action, with their appropriate annotations, which Bob Tracy had laid down for himself in his solitary moments of reflection; and, trite and universally obvious as they may appear to be to some people, Tracy attached no inconsiderable importance to some of the brilliant discoveries therein made. Entering life with a warm heart and generous feelings, it was not till very late that Tracy had learnt to appreciate men as they are and the world as it is. In some senses he might be said to know the world young; but it was only that he knew how to hunt, to drink, to conduct an intrigue with a woman, or to say a sharp thing better and at an earlier age than most men. Of the real practical affairs of life he knew little or nothing; and, too late, he was led to acknowledge that plain practical common sense is worth all the Latin and Greek in the world in a child's education. With regard to a knowledge of the world, great and incalculable advantage results from the mere circumstance of being born in an elevated station. The nobleman is, as it were, placed on an eminence, from which he has a commanding and extended view of the country wide around him; he can distinguish the bearings and relative positions of ob

jects, of which the man placed in the valley can only see one at a time: the man of high birth, from his very position, and even from the experience of business which the management and expenditure of his own fortune naturally afford him, must necessarily hear subjects discussed, follies ridiculed, and facts mentioned in his very childhood, which come to the knowledge of one of humbler condition only by chance, and in the course of the experience of his after-life. Tracy was the son of a country clergyman. His knowledge of the world he had to earn entirely for himself, by the efforts of his own labour and his own individual observation,