ial duty and affection,
Is worthy of example and remembrance.
Their mother was a priestess of the queen
Of the supreme and mighty Jupiter!
And she besought her goddess to send down
The best of blessings on her duteous sons.
Her prayers were heard--they slept and died!"
Then you account me not among the happy?
To which the sage gave answer--
"King of Lydia! Our philosophy
Is but ill suited to the courts of kings.
We do not glory in our own prosperity,
Nor yet admire the happiness of others.
All bliss is brief and superficial,
And should not be accounted as a good,
But that which lasts unto our being's end.
The life of man is threescore years and ten,
Which being summed in the whole amount
Unto some thousands of swift-winged days,
Of which there are not two alike;
So those which are to come, being unknown,
Are but a series of accidents:
Therefore esteem we no man happy,
But him whose happiness continues to the end!
We cannot win the prize until the contest's o'er!"

_Cyrus_.--Solon hath saved one king
And taught another! Torchmen, we reprieve
The captive Croesus.

CYMBELINE.

* * * * *

PAUL'S CROSS.

(_For the Mirror_.)

"----Friers and faytours have fonden such questions
To plese with the proud men, sith the pestilence time,[4]
And preachen at St. Paul's, for pure envi fo clarkes,
That praiers have no powre the pestilence to lette."

_Piers Plowman's Visions_.

[4] The great plague in 1347.

The early celebrity of Paul's Cross, as the greatest seat of pulpit
eloquence, is evinced in the lines above quoted, which give us to
understand that the most subtle and abstract questions in theology were
handled here by the Friars, in opposition to the secular clergy, almost
at the first settlement of that popular order of preachers in England.

Of the custom of preaching at crosses it is difficult to trace the
origin; it was doubtless far more remote than the period alluded to, and
_Pennant_ thinks, at first accidental. The sanctity of this species of
pillar, he observes, often caused a considerable resort of people to pay
their devotion to the great object of their erection. A preacher, seeing
a large concourse might be seized by a sudden impulse, ascend the steps,
and deliver out his pious advice from a station so fit to inspire
attention, and so conveniently formed for the purpose. The example might
be