There was, however, a refinement in Thomson's appetite quite unknown to his critic. He delighted to draw down the rich plum, with the blue on it, into his mouth without the help of his hands, which hung listlessly in his pockets. Johnson's love of plums betrayed him into an amusing extravagance. When he was in the Isle of Skye, the conversation turning on the advantage of wearing linen, he said that the juice from a plum-tree on the fingers was not disagreeable, because it was a vegetable sub

stance.

The other coincidence was in panegyrics of early rising: "I tell all young people," wrote Johnson, "and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good." Meanwhile, in his diary, April, 1765, he confesses a general habit of lying in bed until two o'clock in the afternoon. The poet's theory and practice were not closer. His famous apostrophe

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake! would have startled nobody more than his own servant. Good Mrs. Carter-skilful in translating Epictetus, and making a pudding, and who lived to the verge of ninety years—always rose at six, and left a pleasant admonition for sleepy readers:

The poets will tell you a deal of Aurora,

And how much she improves all the beauties of Flora;
Though you need believe neither the poets nor me,
But convince your own senses, and get up and see.

MAY 25th. I have been impressed by a remark of Professor Wilson, in Mill's History of India, that people who declaim against the tyranny of caste, should recollect its compensations. The caution need not be limited to the Hindus. Whatever be the varieties of human states and fortunes, some delicate turn of the balance makes them equal. The scale is in the hand of God. The thrush sings in the cottager's garden, and the skeleton hangs behind the gold tapestry. Even the mute creation clears up dark passages in the economy of the intellectual. For one gift bestowed, another is taken away. The bird of paradise has coarse legs. The eye of the bat is too weak for the gloom it inhabits; therefore the sense of touch is quickened; it sees with its feet, and easily and safely guides itself in the swiftest flight. The sloth has a similar provision. Look at it on the ground, and you wonder at the grotesque freaks of nature; but follow it up a tree; watch it suspending its body by the hooked toes, and swinging from bough to bough, and you perceive its organization to be exactly suited to

its wants. Paley notices the same principle of compensation in the elephant and crane. The short unbending neck of the first receives a remedy in the flexible trunk; the long legs of the second enable it to wade where the structure of its feet prevents it from swimming.

The changes of light and shade are tempered to insect sensibility. In the deserts of the Torrid Zone, the setting sun calls up myriads of little creatures, that would perish in its full brightness: while, in the wintry solitudes of the north, sunset is the signal for repose. The lesson of compensation is taught by the humming of flies along the hedges. The flutterer of a day has no reason to complain of the shortness of its life. It was a thought of Malebranche, that the ephemera may regard a minute as we look upon a year. The delusion is its recompence.

And if we turn to the history and fortunes of men, a long series of balances keeps opening on the eye. The ear alone might be a motto for an essay. In South America, a cicada is heard a mile; a man only a few yards. Kirby has calculated that, if the voice increased in volume proportionably to the size of the body, it would resound over the world. Every inch must deepen the thunder; and two giants might converse with

ease from the North Pole and the Ganges. The slightest enlargement of stature would be watched with apprehension; and an island with one man of seven feet in it be altogether uninhabitable. Pope did not forget this providential adaptation of the organ to happiness:

If Nature thundered in his opening ears,

And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish that Heaven had left him still
The whisp'ring zephyr and the purling rill.

Who will complain that he is more inaudible than the grasshopper?

Man has another compensation in the fineness of his ear. Dugald Stewart remarked of the warbling of birds, that it gives pleasure to none of the quadrupeds; nor is it even certain if the music of one species gratifies another. Who ever heard a sparrow pause in his impertinent chirp, because a lark sprang wavering into song above his head? There is no reason to suppose that the owl considers his hooting in any degree less agreeable than the chant of the nightingale. If, therefore, we have a fainter tongue, let us look for and find our balance in a more sensitive hearing. We see a sublime illustration of the theory in the nature and teaching of our religion.

The Bible is a history of compensation. The

prophecies of the New Covenant were uttered in seasons of depression-at the fall of Adam, the separation of Abraham, the bondage of Israel, the giving of the Law by Moses, the captivity of Babylon. Cloud and rainbow appear together. There is wisdom in the saying of Feltham, that the whole creation is kept in order by discord, and that vicissitude maintains the world. Many evils-many blessings. Manna drops in the wilderness- corn grows in Canaan. Rarely two blessings, or two trials, console or afflict us at the same time. Human life is the Prophet's declaration drawn out into examples: - "God stayeth his rough wind in the day of his east wind."

And one curious and beautiful feature of the Divine scheme of compensation is seen in its changing our sorrows into instruments and channels of joy and comfort. The curtained chamber of sickness sows the barren field with flowers. A sick man seated in his garden, or tottering down a green lane for a few minutes, might suppose himself transported into the morning and sunlight of creation:

The common air, the earth, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise.

Plato relates that Socrates, on the day of his