More keen that one of these was rotten--
Moved me to seek some forest lair
Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,
Attired in skins, by berries stained,
Absolved from brushes and ablution;--
But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained,
Fate gave me up to execution.

I saw it all but now. The grin
That gnarled old Gardener Sandy's features;
My father, scholar-like and thin,
Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;
I saw--ah me !--I saw again
My dear and deprecating mother;
And then, remembering the cane,
Regretted--that _I'd left the other._

MACAULAY'S WIT
[Sidenote: _Macaulay_]

I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of
semi-Solomon. He _half_ knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to
him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II.
But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to
run, though not to soar.

... Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad
verses, and Jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of
Lady Millar.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of
misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great
commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's
wife.

CRANFORD
[Sidenote: _Mrs. Gaskell_]

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the
holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married couple
come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is
either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford
evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his
ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great
neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a
railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not
at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The surgeon has his
round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a
surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a
weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully
at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing at