mers, like a wild-cat in a rabbit warren, startling them out of their
long dream of ease and safety, with news of doubled rents, and notices
to quit, to make way for threshing-machines, winnowing-machines,
corn-crushers, patent ploughs, scufflers, scarifiers, and young men of
more enterprise. And, sure enough, such will be the order of the day the
moment the estate falls to the YOUNG SQUIRE.--_Country Year Book._

[From Hogg's Instructor.]

PRESENCE OF MIND--A FRAGMENT.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

The Roman _formula_ for summoning an earnest concentration of the
faculties upon any object whatever, that happened to be critically
urgent, was _Hoc age_, "Mind _this_!" or, in other words, do not mind
_that_--_non illud age_. The antithetic formula was "_aliud_ agere," to
mind something alien, or remote from the interest then clamoring for
attention. Our modern military orders of "_Attention!_" and "_Eyes
strait!_" were both included in the "_Hoc age_." In the stern
peremptoriness of this Roman formula we read a picturesque expression of
the Roman character both as to its strength and its weakness--of the
energy which brooked no faltering or delay (for beyond all other races
the Roman was _natus rebus agendis_)--and also of the morbid craving for
action, which was intolerant of any thing but the intensely practical.

In modern times, it is we of the Anglo-Saxon blood, that is, the British
and the Americans of the United States, who inherit the Roman
temperament with its vices and its fearful advantages of power. In the
ancient Roman these vices appeared more barbarously conspicuous. We, the
countrymen of Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, and at one time the
leaders of austere thinking, can not be supposed to shrink from the
speculative through any native incapacity for sounding its depths. But
the Roman had a real inaptitude for the speculative: to _him_ nothing
was real that was not practical. He had no metaphysics; he wanted the
metaphysical instinct. There was no school of _native_ Roman philosophy:
the Roman was merely an eclectic or _dilettanti_ picking up the crumbs
which fell from Grecian tables; and even mathematics was so repulsive in
its sublimer aspects to the Roman mind, that the very word mathematics
had in Rome collapsed into another name for the dotages of astrology.
The mathematician was a mere variety of expression for the wizard or the
conjurer.

From this unfavorable aspect of the Roman intellect