cursions and retrocessions of
invention."--See _Lives of the Poets_, vol. i. p. 188.

[16] Even M. Alphonse de Lamartine acknowledges of Mirabeau, that
"neither his character, his deeds, nor his thoughts, have the brand of
immortality."--_Hist. Giron._ Liv. i. chap. 3.

[17] This incident was suggested by a touching sentence in Schindler's
biography of Beethoven. After observing that the outward sense no longer
co-operated with the inward mind of the great composer, and that,
consequently, "the outpourings of his fancy became scarcely
intelligible," Schindler continues:--_"Sometimes he would lay his left
hand flat upon the key-board, and thus drown, in discordant noise, the
music to which his right was feelingly giving utterance._"--See _Life of
Beethoven, Edited by Ignace Moschelles_, ii. 175.

MAGA IN AMERICA.

_New York, August_ 1847.

My Dear Godfrey--You will laugh when you hear into what a practical
blunder I was led, by a desire to gratify your curiosity concerning
Maga's Icon in America. I wondered you should ask me for a description,
when it was so easy to have ordered out the thing itself; and so
resolved to save myself the trouble of writing a long story, by duly
exporting a specimen of the American Ebony, from which you might form
your own conclusions as to its counterfeit merits, and its supposed
relations to the great question of international copyright. _Segnius
irritant_--you know! What disciple of old Plunkett's will ever forget
the difference between the _demissa per aurem_, and

----"quae sunt _oculis_ subjecta fidelibus!"

I have always maintained that his illustration of this great principle
gave Dickens the hint of his Dotheboy's Hall. You remember, doubtless,
poor Harry Farmar's false quantity, and how Plunkett made him peel
onions till he cried his eyes out; asserting his confidence in Horace's
maxim, and that he had found the usual box on the ear quite incapable of
any exciting effect on Harry's mind. Who would have said that the same
Harry, surviving the operation, would have lived to hunt bisons on the
prairies of Western America, after riding on elephants in India, and
bestriding a camel's hump through the waste places of Edom! Harry's
wandering mind has developed as vagabond a habit of life as ever his
prophetic instructor ventured to predict; but he vows himself cured at
last, and that, if he ever sets foot again on England's _terra f