me lain;
Here to my LARES offer up
The warm prayer of a grateful heart;
THOU that my household guardian art,
That dost to me thine aid impart,
And with thy mercy fill'st my cup;
Strengthen the hope within my soul,
Till I in faith may reach the goal.

PROFESSOR SHAW.

A SKETCH.

PLUTARCH SHAW, the naturalist, was lately in the stocks, which has been a
matter of much talk among the virtuosi, and a good deal of malicious
laughter on all hands. He cut a devil of a figure, rest assured, propped
up in a straight jacket, his eye fiery with vengeance; the innocent victim
of 'circumstances,' and that very common error of putting the saddle on
the wrong horse. A very little explanation will serve to place this matter
in the right light, and show by what a fantastic adventure an honest man,
who was alway given to roam over much territory, was suddenly placed upon
the limits, and one of the most profound explorers of the curious became
himself for the time being a curiosity.

Mr. Shaw is so much of an enthusiast, that it is very unpleasant to stand
near him when he is talking about his bugs, or exhibiting his specimens,
on account of being spattered all over with the spray of his eloquence. A
bat shot down in the dusk of the evening is enough to set him half crazy,
and make the saliva fly all over; it rolls and surges against the bulwarks
of his jagged teeth in a rabid foam, showers out with his descriptions,
and makes him only tolerable at arm's length. The beetles and butterflies
which he has transfixed are innumerable; and he is perpetually syringing
down the humming-birds, as stationary on vibrating wings, these beautiful
creatures of the air plunge their beaks deep into the cups of flowers.
With him pin-money is an item. If he marks any thing curious in the
natural world, he 'sticks a pin there,' and keeps it for future reference;
any thing from a lady-bug ready to unfold suddenly the gauze upon its hard
back, where you would think no wings existed, and fly away, to an
offensive black beetle that snuffs the candle, or cracks its head against
the wall, thence upward in the scale to the bird which Liberty loves as
her sublimest emblem, the proudest of the proud, the bird of our own
mountains, and the eagle of our own skies.

'I would not heedlessly set foot upon a worm,'

writes Cowper: not so however with the great Shaw, whose collection of
worms is most disgusting; exceeded only by his re