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by any Englishman, on first hearing him, would have been, how this mouth, 66 formed for great utterances," would ever be able to manage them in that extraordinary Fifeshire dialect. He pronounced "Adam," "Aidam," "Parish,' "Pairish," "Pope of Rome," "Popp of Romm," issue of which," "isshy of whuch." By no chance did he pronounce any three words in any one sentence correctly according to the English standard; and for all his own countrymen out of Fifeshire he was equally a vocal wonder. It was impossible to cure him. All the pebbles on the beach of St. Andrews would never have brought the mouth and tongue of this young Demosthenes into conformity with the rules of Attic elocution. As it happened, it did not matter much. To his fellow Scots, when they came to hear him, the Fifeshire dialect was as good as any other of the provincial dialects of which they had their choice, and racier than most; and, when his audiences came to be English as well, there was no thought of the dialect after the stunning astonishment of the first few sentences.

In the third place, I note in Chalmers, from the first, the possession, in a very large degree, of a quality which I do not think will ever be found wanting in any really first-rate men, though it may assume different forms according to the other qualities with which it is associated -a quality which, coining a monstrous word for my purpose, I will venture to call propositionalness. It is, in the main, identical with that passion for intellectual generalization which we often speak of as particularly visible in the French mind. It shows itself in a habit of gathering up one's meanings or conclusions on all sorts of subjects into definite propositions or verbal formulæ, which thenceforth are carried about with one, and serve as one's intellectual banknotes.

This craving after intellectual comprehensiveness and definiteness, this tendency of the thoughts always to coagulate into phrases and verbal formulæ which are then used as enunciations, was a notable characteristic of Chalmers

tachment to his generalizations was unusually strong, and, whenever he had elaborated one, he made it go as far as possible by incessant repetition, it so happened that, by the end of his life, his mind had almost become an apparatus of a certain number of ideas of which it would have been easy to take an inventory. He positively could not speak unless he had some distinct and massive proposition to expound which he had been ruminating and shaping. One result of this mental habit was that he was very liable to be taken aback if called upon on a sudden for an opinion on a new matter. On such occasions his mind seemed to be in that state which the Scotch call through-ither; he seemed to be ransacking the near part of his mind for a proposition that would answer at once the new demand, and, not finding any, to be in some confusion while the message was flying back that was to bring his reserved forces to the front. Give him an hour or two, however, or even twenty minutes, and he would have made his arrangements, and would have so organized his thoughts for the emergency that, at the end of that time, you found him quite ready, with a new proposition or two regularly on march. This quality of propositionalness, which was to me one of the most interesting studies in Chalmers in his later days, I am able to detect, among other things, in the earliest specimens of his writing that remain.

What was Chalmers's outfit or stock of propositions at the age of twenty-one ? We will not answer that question at present, save by a word or two of general significance. In Theology he was a Moderate-with a high natural Theism of his own, which, with some help from Butler's "Analogy," had survived the shock of Mirabaud's reasonings; and with such an estimate of Christianity as, in the prevailing opinion of the Scottish Kirk, then honestly befitted her parishministers and licentiates. With the Evangelical, High-flying, or, in English phrase, Methodist minority among the

sympathy; and this was one of the differences between Thomas and his pious father in the Anstruther household. In politics he had, I think, come out of the Revolutionary fever, and was, in a way of his own-unless Burke was his model-patriotic and conservative. He had a large stock of notions derived from the mathematical, mechanical, and chemical sciences, and an extraordinary power of transferring them, or suggestions from them, into moral subjects. His opinion of the Scottish Philosophy of Reid, as it had been unfolded to him by the expositions of Dugald Stewart, was that it contained a needless multiplication of first principles; and, on the whole, notwithstanding his ever-active ideality and

his enthusiastic temperament, he desired farther analysis, and had an inclination to the philosophy which resolves all into experience and a disinclination to the philosophy of necessary beliefs. Finally, he had just betaken himself, with his usual vehement ardour, to the study of Political Economy. Adam Smith, I suppose, he had read before he was twenty -the "Wealth of Nations" being the native property of Fifeshire. Malthus on Population he read, he told me, in the year 1800. The book had such an effect upon him that he clutched its main principle at once as an axiom for statesmen and philanthropists, and never all his life parted with it, or would allow disbelief in it or inattention to it to be anything short of idiotcy.

In caverns under me,

Melted away in mist,

IF "the boy is father of the man," the girl is likewise mother to the woman; and the woman-oh, solemn thought, laden with awful responsibility to each tiny maiden-child that coos and crows at us from her innocent cradle !-the woman is the mother of us all. Far deeper and higher than the advocates of woman's rights are aware of, lies the truth, that women are the heart of the world. From a gynocracy, or even a self-existent, self-protecting, and selfdependent rule, heaven save us, and all other Christian communities! but the fact remains, that on the women of a nation does its virtue, strength, nobility, and even its vitality, rest. Sparta recognised this in a rough barbaric way;

Judea, too, when through successive ages every daughter of Abraham was brought up to long for offspring, in the hope that of her might be born the Messiah, the promised Seed. All history, carefully examined, would, we believe, exemplify the same truth-that the rise and fall of nations is mainly dependent on the condition of their women-the mothers, sisters, daughters, wives-who, consciously or unconsciously, mould, and will mould for ever, the natures, habits, and lives of the men to whom they belong. Nay, even in modern times, in looking around upon divers foreign countries-but stay, we will not judge our neighbours, we will only judge ourselves.

If things be so, if the influence of women is so great, so inevitable, either for good or for evil, does it not behove us, who live in a generation where so many strange conflicts are waging on the surface of society, so many new elements stirring and seething underneath itdoes it not behove us, I say, to look a little more closely after our "girls?"

It is rather difficult now-a-days to find

1 Thoughts from a Girl's Life. By Lucy

a "girl" at all. They are, every one of them, "young ladies;" made up of hoop and flounce, hat and feather, plaits of magnificent (bought) hair, and heaps of artificial flowers. There is a painful uniformity, too, in them and their doings-their walking, talking, singing, dancing, seem all after the same pattern, done to order according to the same infallible rule-" What will Mrs. Grundy say?" An original natural "girl," who has grown up after her own fashion, and never heard of Mrs. Grundy, is a creature so rare, that when we find her, at any age from twelve to twenty, we are prone to fall right over head and ears in love with her, carry her off, and marry her immediately. And we hardly wonder that so many of these vapid, commonplace, well-dressed, well-mannered young ladies remain unmarried, or rush into the opposite extreme of frantic independence, and try to create an impossible Utopia, of which the chief characteristic seems to be that of the heaven of Crazy Jane in the ballad—

"With not a man to meet us there." Which is most harmful, this foolish aping of men's manners, habits, and costumes, or the frivolous laziness, the worse than womanish inanity, which wastes a whole precious lifetime over the set of its hoops, the fashion of its bonnets, or the gossip of its morning callers, let wiser heads than the present writer's decide. Between the two opposite evils, most welcome is anything, or anybody, that indicates in the smallest degree what a girl really is and ought to be; thus giving us some hope for the women that are to come, the mothers of the next generation.

Thanks, therefore, to "Lucy Fletcher" -whether that name be real or assumed-for a little unpretentious book of verses, entitled Thoughts from a Girl's Life." Let her speak for herself,

simplicity and dignified modesty, is itself almost a poem.

"These verses are the true expression "of the thoughts and feelings of a girl's "life, and as such they are given specially "to other girls.

"I will not apologize too much for their "want of poetical merit; nevertheless it "is with a full consciousness of their "immaturity that I send them forth. But "though the deepening life of years to come may teach a fuller and a higher "tone, yet I feel that the thoughts and "utterances of to-day may be best fitted "to reach and to help those who stand "on the level from which these were "written.

"I do not, of course, imply that every "word in these verses is true as regards "my own life; in poetry less than in any "other form of expression, would that be "possible; many of the incidents are "idealized, and some of the feelings "known more by sympathy than by "personal experience.

"I send my little book with its own "message to those who will care to hear "it; I shall be most glad and thankful "if it is able in any degree to sympathise "with, to help, or to cheer those hearts "to whom from my own I speak."

A girl's book-only a girl. Now, ordinarily a youthful poetess is a very unpleasant character. The less a girl writes the better-that is, publishes: almost all girls write, and nothing will stop them. Nor is there any actual harm in their mild verses and elaborate love-stories-the temporary outburst of fancy or feeling that will soon settle down into its proper channel, and find a safe outlet in the realities of domestic life. But there is harm in encouraging in the smallest degree that exaggerated sentimentality which wears out emotion in expression, converting all life into a perpetual pose plastique, or a romantic drama of which she, the individual, is the would-be heroine. And worse still is that cacoethes scribendi, that frantic craving for literary reputation, which lures a girl from her natural duties, her

of writing women-of which the very highest, noblest, and most successful feel, that to them, as women, what has been gained is at best a poor equivalent for what has been lost.

In one sense the kindest wish that a reader can wish to " Lucy Fletcher," is that this her first book may also be her last; and yet it is a good book to have written, good and true, and valuable too-as truth always is.

"A girl's life." What a mysterious thing that is! None who have reached the stand-point whence they can fairly and dispassionately look back on theirs, but must feel awed at remembering all it was, and all it promised to be -its infinite hopes, its boundless aspirations, its dauntless energies, its seemingly unlimited capacity for both joy and pain. All these things may have calmed down now: the troubled chaos has long settled into a perfect—and yet how imperfect!-world: but the mature woman, of whatever age or fortunes, can hardly look without keenest sympathy and trembling pity on those who have yet to go through it all. For, let poets talk as they will of that charming time in which a girl is

"Standing with reluctant feet

Where the brook and river meet-
Womanhood and childhood sweet,"

the years between twelve and twenty are, to most, a season anything but pleasant; a crisis in which the whole heart and brain are full of tumult, when all life looks strange and bewildering-delirious with exquisite unrealities,

and agonized with griefs equally chimerical and unnatural. Therefore, every influence caught, and every impression given during these years, is a matter of most vital moment. Most girls' characters are stamped for life by the associations they form, and the circumstances by which they are surrounded, during their teens. They may change and grow-thank heaven all good men and women have never done growing!— but the primary mould is rarely recast; however worn or defaced, it retains the