literary rascalities may be of small moment to the smooth scholar; but they should be of more importance than any other form of literature to the patriot and statesman. Good books are the most precious of blessings to a people; bad books are among the worst of curses. The romance of rascality in the imagination will be followed by the reality of rascality in the conduct. It contains in itself principles of demoralization which will inevitably be felt in action. This country is the only country where everybody reads. It is of much importance to know what everybody is reading. How much of this reading is ninepenny immorality, ninepenny irreligion, ninepenny stupidity, ninepenny deviltry? It might not be gratifying to the national pride of "the most enlightened people on earth" to answer this question.

THE CROAKERS OF SOCIETY AND LIT

ERATURE.

IN modern society there are innumerable obstacles in the way of obtaining or preserving a healthy condition of the heart and brain. The ten thousand prejudices, resulting from peculiarities of individual constitution, or those which are insensibly imbibed in social life, are apt to distort the mind, and vitiate the judgment and feelings. Society is cursed with so much deep-seated mental disease, and such a number of psychological epidemics, that it has been petulantly fleered at by some as a huge Hospital of Incurables." There is no nonsense so transparent, no crotchet so ridiculous, no system so unreasonable, that it cannot find advocates and disciples. The maladies of the body, produced by artificial modes of living, reäct upon the mind, and infect the reason and sentiments; and many a spurious philosophical system is the product, not of induction, but dyspepsia; and many a plan of reform, assuming to come from the brain, has its true origin in the bile. A sickening feebleness covers its imbecile elegance, under the name of refinement, and the energy of disease and madness struts and fumes in the habiliments of power. Nothing is rarer than to see, among the vast mass of men, a healthy, strong-minded, simple man. From amiable weaknesses down to unamiable insanities, there are unnumbered dis

orders and infirmities which stunt the free growth and development of our natures.

a biped that infests all

One of the most melancholy productions of this condition of life is the sniveller, classes of society, and prattles from the catechism of despair on all subjects of human concern. The spring of his mind is broken. A babyish, nerveless fear has driven the sentiment of hope from his soul. He cringes to every phantom of apprehension, and obeys the impulses of cowardice as though they were the laws of existence. He is the very Jeremiah of conventionalism, and his life one long and lazy lamentation. In connection with his maudlin brotherhood, his humble aim in life is to superadd the snivelization of society to its civilization. He snivels in the cradle, at the school, at the altar, in the market, on the death-bed. His existence is the embodiment of a whine. Passion in him is merely a whimper. He clings to what is established as a snail to a rock. He sees nothing in the future but evil, nothing in the past but good. His speech is the dialect of sorrow; he revels in the rhetoric of lamentation. His mind, or the thing he calls his mind, is full of forebodings, premonitions, and all the fooleries of pusillanimity. He mistakes the tremblings of his nerves for the intuitions of his reason. Of all bores he is the most intolerable and merciless. He drawls misery to you He is master of all

through his nose, on all occasions. the varieties of the art of petty tormenting. He tells you his fears, his anxieties, his opinions of men and things, his misfortunes and his dreams, as though they were the most edifying and delightful of topics for discourse. Over every hope of your own he throws the gloom of his despondency. He is a limping treatise on

ennui, who invades sanctuaries to which no mere book could possibly gain admittance.

It must be confessed that all snivellers do not attain this height of their ideal, and that there are many degrees of foolery among the class. It requires a peculiar mental and bodily constitution, and an uncommonly bad experience of life, so to pervert the object of our being and the laws of our nature as to produce a finished whimperer. But still there is no community free from a multitude of croakers and alarmists, who display with greater or less completeness the qualities we have pointed out, and who afflict the patience and conscience of all good Christians within the reach of their influence. They are of various kinds, and exercise their miserymaking propensities in manifold ways. We find them among lawyers, physicians, politicians, merchants, farmers, and clergymen, as well as among poets and old Wherever man, sin, and the gallows are, there is the sniveller. As a citizen and politician, he has, for the last three hundred years, opposed every useful reform, and wailed over every rotten institution as it fell. He has been and is the foe of all progress, and always cries over the memory of the "good old days." He is ever fearful of the present. His slough of despond of to-day is his paradise of to-morrow. As a clergyman, he has no force of reasoning or unction, but whines dubiously about the sin of the world, and the impossibility of checking it; he tells his congregation that the earth is a vale of tears, that they should do nothing but lament over their degeneracy, and hints the probability that few of them can be saved from the fire that is not quenched. He makes the house of mourning more mournful, and

women.

tolls the funeral bell of his voice as he joins loving hands in marriage.

But it is in literature that the sniveller is most unendurable, for in composition he can give full expression to much which human nature would prevent him from displaying in conduct. Reader, have you not seen or read many a snivelling poet?- those weak manikins and dapper authorlings who mistake indigestion for inspiration? Heaven save us all from such an inflic tion! There is nothing so bad as the slave of despondency when he attempts to dance in the chains of rhyme. He sets his groans and grumblings to a kind of squeaking tune, and forces innocent types to be the pander of his passion for melancholy. He goes about the streets of the intellectual republic, wearing "his heart upon his sleeve," and praying all charitable persons to drop into his hat some coppers of commiseration and crumbs of consolation. He wishes to make the whole world his confidant, to paste up the placards of his misery in the public markets,— to inform all men and women that his heart is dust, that his hopes are blighted, and that unhappiness is his portion, -to exhibit the most recondite secrets of his bosom to the gaze of tattlers and sneerers, with the expectation of sympathy; and, with effeminate plaints of fictitious woes, to snivel away his life in a vain attempt to turn his metrical drivelling into the current coin of the land. He trusts that if hard, cold, inhuman man refuses a hearing to his maudlin miseries, the tender heart of angelic woman will pity and purchase his misfortunes. All the "little feeblenesses generated in the atmosphere of "conventionalism's airtight stove," which make his mind the seat of more infirmities than the pharmacopoeia dreams of, he expects