l _italicize_ the
fact. Or would you picture woman meek and pure, By love and virtue
tutor'd to endure, With cunning skill you take a felon's trull,
Stuff her with sentiment, and scrunch her skull! Oh! would your
crashing, smashing, mashing pen were mine, That I could "scorch
your eyeballs" with my words,

"MY VALENTINE."

* * * * *

DEATH BED REVELATIONS.

Men before they die see and comprehend enigmas hidden from them before.
The greatest poet, and one of the noblest thinkers of the last age, said
on his death-bed:--"Many things obscure to me before, now clear up and
become visible."

* * * * *

STAMMERING WIT.

Stammering, (says Coleridge,) is sometimes the cause of a pun. Some one
was mentioning in Lamb's presence the cold-heartedness of the Duke of
Cumberland, in restraining the duchess from rushing up to the embrace of
her son, whom she had not seen for a considerable time, and insisting
on her receiving him in state. "How horribly _cold_ it was," said the
narrator. "Yes," said Lamb, in his stuttering way; "but you know he is
the Duke of _Cu-cum-ber-land_."

* * * * *

ORIGIN OF BOTTLED ALE.

Alexander Newell, Dean of St. Paul's, and Master of Westminster School,
in the reign of Queen Mary, was an excellent angler. But Fuller says,
while Newell was catching of fishes, Bishop Bonner was catching of
Newell, and would certainly have sent him to the shambles, had not a
good London merchant conveyed him away upon the seas. Newell was fishing
upon the banks of the Thames when he received the first intimation of
his danger, which was so pressing, that he dared not go back to his own
house to make any preparation for his flight. Like an honest angler, he
had taken with him provisions for the day; and when, in the first year
of England's deliverance, he returned to his country, and to his own
haunts, he remembered that on the day of his flight he had left a bottle
of beer in a safe place on the bank: there he looked for it, and "found
it no bottle, but a gun--such the sound at the opening thereof; and this
(says Fuller) is believed (casualty is mother of more invention than
industry) to be the original of bottled ale in England."

* * * * *

BAD'S THE BEST.

Canning was once asked by an English clergyman, at whose parsonage he
was visiting, how he liked