Hobbies

HE all ride something. It Is folly to expect us always to be walking. The cheapest thing to ride is a hobby: it eats no oats, it demands no groom, it breaks no traces, it requires no shoeing. Moreover, it is safest: the boisterous outbreak of children’s fun does not startle it; three babies astride it at once do not make it skittish. If, perchance, on some brisk morning it throw its rider, it will stand still till he climbs the saddle. For eight years we have had one tramping the nursery, and yet no accident; though meanwhile his eye has been knocked out and his tail dislocated.

When we get old enough to leave the nursery we jump astride some philosophic, metaphysical, literary, political, or theological hobby.

Parson Brownlow’s hobby was the hanging of rebels; John C. Calhoun’s, South Carolina; Daniel Webster’s, the Constitution; Wheeler’s, the sewing-machine; Doctor Windship’s, gymnastics. For saddle, a book; for spur, a pen; for whip, the lash of public opinion; for race-course, platform, pulpit, newspaper- office, and senate chamber. Goodyear’s hobby is made out of India - rubber, Peter Cooper’s out of glue, Townsend’s out of sarsaparilla bottles, Heenan’s out of battered noses. De Witt Clinton rode his up the ditch of the Erie Canal, Cyrus Field under the sea, John P. Jackson down the railroad from Amboy to Camden; indeed, the men of mark and the men of worth have all had their hobby, great or small. The philosophy is plain. Men think a great while upon one topic, and its importance increases till it absorbs everything else, and, impelled by this high appreciation of their theory, they go on to words and deeds that make themselves thoroughly felt. We have no objections to hobbies, but we contend that there are times and places, when and where they should not be ridden. A few specifications.

We have friends who are allopathlsts, homoeopathists, Thompsonians, or eclectics. We have no more prejudices against one school than the other. Let them each set up their claims. One of our friends about five years ago became a homoeopathist. All right! But since then she has been able to talk of nothing else. She insists on our taking the pellets. We say, “We feel somewhat tired to - night; “she exclaims,” Cinchona or Cocculus! “We sneeze quite violently, and she cries” Belladonna! “We suggest that the apple - dumpling did not agree with us, and she proposes” Chamomilla.” When she walks I seem to hear the rattling of pellets. Discovering my prejudice against pills, she insists on my taking it in powder. I tell her that ever since my chaplaincy in the army I have disliked powder. She says I will rue it when too late. Perhaps I may, but I cannot stand these large doses of homoeopathy. I had rather be bled at once and have done with it, than be everlastingly shot with pellets. She talks it day and night. Her Sabbath is only a sanctified homoeopathy. She prefers theology in very small doses. Her hope of the reformation of society is in the fact that ministers themselves are sinners — “Similia similibiis curanturr She thinks it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for old-school doctors to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Alas! how much calomel and jalap they will have to answer for! How will they dare to meet on the other shore the multitudes that they let slip before their time, when they might with a few pellets have bribed Charon to keep them this side of Acheron and Styx! She reads to us 2 Chron. xvi. 12, 13, “Asa sought to the physicians, and slept with his fathers.” You see they killed him! She considers herself a missionary to go out into the highways and hedges of allopathy and eclecticism to compel them to come in. She is an estimable lady. We always like to have her come to our house. She is more interested in your health than any one you would find in all the hard-hearted crew of allopathy. But five years ago she got a side-saddle, threw it on the back of a hobby, and has been riding ever since — tramp, tramp, tramp — round the parlor, through the hall, up the stairs, down the cellar, along the street, through the church; and I fear that in her last “will and testament” she will have nothing to leave the world but a medicine-chest, well-worn copies of “Hahnemann’s Chronic Diseases,” and “Jahr’s Manual,” and directions as to how many powders are to be put in the tumblers, with the specific charge to have the spoons clean, and not mix the medicines.

We notice that many have a mania for talking of their ailments. One question about their health will tilt over on you the great reservoir of their complaints. They have told the story so often that they can slide through the whole scale from C above to C below. For thirty years their spine has been at a discount, and they never were any better of neuralgia, till they took the rheumatism. At first you feel sympathy for the invalid; but after awhile the story touches the ludicrous. They tell you that they feel so faint in the morning, and have such poor appetite at noon, and cannot sleep nights, and have twitches in their side, and lumbago in their back, and swellings in their feet, and ringing in their ears, and little dots floating before their eyes; and have taken ammoniacum, tincture of cantharides, hydragogue julep, anthelmintic powder, golden syrup of antimony, leaves of scordium, and, indeed, all hepatics, carminatives, antifebriles, antiscorbutics, splenetics, anthritics, stomachics, ophthalmics; they have gargled their throat with sal ammoniac, and bathed their back wth saponaceous liniment, and worn discutient cataplasms. That very moment they are chewing chamomile flowers to settle their stomachs, and excuse themselves for a moment to take off a mustard -plaster that begins to blister. They come back to express the fear that the swelling on their arm will be an abscess, or their headache turn to brain fever. They shake out from their handkerchief delicate odors of valerian and assafcetida. They are the harvest of druggists, and the amazement of physicians, who no sooner clear the pain from one spot than it appears In another. If one joint loses the pang, another joint gets it, and, the patient having long ago resolved never again to be well, it is only a question between membrane and midriff.

At times we should talk over our distresses, and seek sympathy, but perpetual discourse on such themes wears out the patience of our friends. You always see the young people run from the groaning- valetudinarian; and the minister fails in his condolence, for why speak of the patience of Job to one who says that boils are nothing to his distresses. The hobby he rides is wounded and scabbed and torn with all the diseases mentioned in farriery, glanders, bots, foot -rot, spavin, ring-bone, and “king’s evil.” Incurable nags are taken out on the commons and killed, but this poor hobby jogs on with no hope on the other side of the Red Sea of joining Pharaoh’s horses. The more it limps, and the harder it breathes, the faster they ride it.

Now, Aunt Mary’s sick-room was the brightest room in the house. She had enough aches and pains to confound Materia Medica. Her shelf was crystallized with bottles, and the stand was black with plasters. She could not lay down more than five minutes. Her appetite

was denied all savory morsels. It was always soup, or toast, or gruel, or panado. She had not walked Into the sunlight for fifteen years. Weddings came, for which with her thin, blueveined hands she had knit beautiful presents, but she could not mingle In the congratulations, nor see how the bride looked at the altar. She never again expected to hear a sermon, or sit at the sacrament, or join in the doxology of worshippers. The blithe days of her girlhood would never come back, when she could range the fields in spring-time in flushed excitement, plucking handfuls of wUd-roses from the thicket till hands and cheeks looked like different blooms on the same trellis.

While quite young she had been sent to a first-class boardino;- school. When she had finished her education, she was herself finished. Instead of the romp of the fields, she took the exhausting exercise at five o’clock of the school procession, madame ahead; madame behind; step to step, waterfall to waterfall; eyes right; chins down; noses out; their hearts like muffled drums beating funeral marches. Stop the side glances of those hazel eyes! Quit the tossincT of those flaxen curls! Cease that graceful swing of the balmoral across the street gutter!

She was the only one of the family fortunate enough to get a first - class education. The other females grew up so stout and well, they might have been considered, vulgarly speaking, healthy, and went out Into life to make happy homes and help the poor; only once, and that in the presence of a wound they were dressing, having attempted to faint away, but failed In the undertakinof, as their constitution would not allow It. Thus they always had to acknowledge the disadvantage of not having had the first - class education of Aunt Mary. What If her nerves were worn out, she could read Les Aventu7^es de Telemaque to pay for It. She had sharp pains, but she could understand the Latin phrases In which Dr. Pancoast described them. Her temples throbbed, but then It was a satisfaction to know that it came from being struck on the head with a Greek lexicon. The plasters were uncomfortable, but, oh! the delights of knowing their geometrical shape: the one a pentagon, the other a hexagon. At school in anatomical class she had come to believe that she had a liver, but it had been only a speculative theory; now she had practical demonstration.

Enough to say, Aunt Mary was a life - long invalid, and yet her room was more attractive than any other. The children had to be punished for going up stairs and interrupting Auntie’s napping hours. The kitten would purr at the invalid’s door seeking admittance. At daybreak, the baby would crawl out of the crib and tap its tiny knuckles against the door, waiting for Aunt Mary to open it. If Charlie got from a school-fellow a handful of peaches, the ripest was saved for Auntie. At nightfall, a little procession of frisky night - gowns went up to say their prayers in Auntie’s room, until three years of age supposing that she was the divinity to be worshipped: one hand on their foot, and the other over their eyes that would peep through into Auntie’s face during the solemnities, the “forever and ever, amen,” dashed into Auntie’s neck with a shower of good-night kisses.

When a young maiden of the neighborhood had a great secret to keep, she was apt to get

Aunt Mary to help her keep it. Auntie could sympathize with any young miss who at the picnic had nice things said to her. Auntie’s face had not always been so wrinkled. She had a tiny key to a little box hid away in the back part of the top - drawer, that could have revealed a romance worth telling. In that box a pack of letters in bold hand directed to Miss Mary Tyndale. Also, a locket that contained a curl of brown hair that had been cut from the brow of the college student in whose death her brightest hopes were blasted. Also, two or three pressed flowers, which the last time she was out she brought from the cemetery. When in conversation with a young heart in tender mood she opened that box, she would say nothing for some moments after. Then she would look very earnestly Into the eyes of the maiden, and say, “God bless you, my dear child! I hope you will be very happy!”

Everybody knew her by name, and people who had never seen her face, the black and white, the clean and filthy, those who rode in coaches, and those who trudged the tow-path, would cry out when one of the family passed, “How is Aunt Mary to -day?” On Monday morning the minister would go in, and read more theology in the bright face of the Christian invalid than he had yesterday preached In two sermons, and her voice was as strengthening to him as the long-metre Doxology sung to the tune of “Old Hundred.” When people with a heartache could get no relief elsewhere, they came to that sick - room and were comforted. Auntie had another key that did not open the box in the back part of the top-drawer of the bureau: it was a golden key that opened the casket of the Divine promises. Beside the bottles that stood on Auntie’s shelf, was God’s bottle in which He gathers all our tears. God had given to that thin hand the power to unloose the captive. And they who went in wailing came out singing. John Bunyan’s pilgrim carried his burden a great while: he never knew Auntie.

Yes! yes! the brightest room in the house was hers. Not the less so on the day when we were told she must leave us. That one small room could not keep her. She heard a voice bidding her away. The children broke forth into a tumult of weeping. The place got brighter. There must have been angels in the room. The feet of the celestial ladder were on both sides of that pillow. Little Mary (named after her aunt) said, “Who will hear me say my prayers now?” George said, “Who now will take my part?” Katie cried, “Who will tell us sweet stories about heaven?” Brighter and brighter grew the place. Angels IN THE ROOM! Sound no dirge. Toll no bells. Wear no black. But form a procession of chants, anthems, chorals, and hallelujahs! Put white blossoms in her hand! A white robe on her body! White garlands about her brow! And he, from whose tomb she plucked the flowers the last time she was out, come down to claim his bride. And so let the procession mount the hill, chants, anthems, chorals, and hallelujahs: Forward I the line of march reaching from enchanted sick - room to “house of many mansions.”

So Auntie lived and died. Always sick, but always patient. Her cheerfulness unhorsed black-mailed Gloorh. A perpetual reproof she was to all who make sicknesses their hobby.

We next refer to reformatory hobbies. We believe in the doctrines of teetotalism. In a glass of ice-water, our only beverage, we drink to the success of that cause. We advocate the Maine law. In all appropriate times and places we are ready to fight drunkenness. It has dug its trench across the land, and filled it with the best blood of the nation. But some of our friends have been turned into temperance monomaniacs. They would have temperance cars, and temperance stages, and temperance steamboats, none to ride in them but teetotalers. They have actually proposed milk to take the place of wine at the sacrament. They would make the taking of the pledge a prerequisite of church - membership. They have no mercy for the man who has champagne on his table. They would let a man die of typhoid, before they would give him a drop of Burgundy. They have dwelt upon the one evil till all others are submerged and forgotten. They have horrid nightmares of demijohn and decanter. They talk as though. If a man cleared the whisky cask, he was safe for heaven; forgetful of the fact that the only decent thing about thousands of men is that they do not drink. They would do that if they were not too stingy. We knew a man, who, it was said, to save expense, wheeled his wife to the grave on a wheel - barrow. He never drank. We caught a man stealing watermelons from our patch. He was a teetotaler. It would have been well for us if he had disliked melons as much as he did whiskey. We* have found strong advocates for abstinence in Moyamensing Prison. We believe a man may be consistent in all his professions of temperance, and yet not be worthy to untie the latchet of some who always have wine on their table.

The temperance cause is mightily hindered by such reformatory monomaniacs. In every path you stumble over their hobby.

So we find anti-tobacconists on their hobby.

They can tell you how many miles of pig-tail

have been chewed in the last century, and how

many navies would be borne up by the saliva

if the Atlantic Ocean, emptied of its water,

could become the spittoon of the nation. We

admit that it is not pleasant to sit in a coach

or car with a chewer between us and the wind, the wind blowing toward us. It Is as disagreeable as preaching with a cold in your head and no pocket-handkerchief.

We neither smoke nor chew. The only odor of the weed in our house is from the cigars of our friends who come to see us. And yet we know of two or three men who went to heaven, we think, notwithstanding they were smokers. In their last sickness, whenever they could sit up they took a chew of tobacco. We have no sympathy with those who cannot unwrinkle their upper lip for a half hour after they have caught the breath of a smoker. There are ladies so shocked by the smoking odors which their husbands bring from the club-room that it needs very careful treatment to avoid hysterics; as sensitive as the lady, married in mature years, who persisted in settinof her husband’s boots outside the door, because she could not stand the smell of leather. We would rather have our nose outraged with a whiff from an old pipe than our ear deafened with the clatter of a crazy reformer. We would not have even the man who snuffs, and chews, and smokes, all in the same minute, kicked to death by the heels of our hobby. William H. Seward snuffs. Rufus Choate took opium. George W. Bethune smoked. Good Abraham Van Nest had wine on his table. Presidents of colleges have chewed tobacco. And I expect that after we have been gone so long that our resting-place shall be as completely unknown as that of Moses, many will get to heaven who have not thought just as we do. We will never turn people Into the right way by riding over them with our hobby.

We take a step farther, and look at some “* of our theological hobbies. This is the only kind of horse that ministers can afford to own, and you ought not to be surprised If sometimes In this way they take an airing. We have had some troubles of late in the fact that In these days of brotherhood, Old School and New School got astride of the same hobby, and one fell off before, and the other fell off behind. There was not room enough for so many between mane and tail. It Is well to remember that hobbies sometimes kick, and that theologians, like other people, are vulnerable..

How apt we are to get a religious theory, and ride it up hill and down, and expect that all the armed cavalry of the church shall make way for our hobby! There are theologians who spend their time in trying to douse Baptists, thinking it a great waste to have so much water and not use it for some decisive purpose. Others would like to upset the anxious bench of the Methodists, and throw them on their faces, so that they would make less noise. Others would like nothing better than to rip a hole in the surplice of Episcopacy. Others take the doctrine of “election” for their favorite theory, and ride, and ride, till they find themselves elected to leave the settlement. Others harp on the “perseverance of the saints,” till they are unhorsed by the perseverance of sinners. And this good man devotes himself to proving that in Adam all fell, till the hearers wish that the speaker had fallen clear out of their acquaintanceship.

This ecclesiastic gives his time to controversy, and his matin and vesper are, “Blessed be the Lord, who teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” Such persons were sound asleep that Christmas night when the angel song fell to the hills, “Peace on earth, good will to men.” We have been watching for the horns to come out on their forehead. They are the rams and the he-goats. They feel that they were appointed from eternity to stick somebody, and they beat Samson In the number of Philistines they slay with the same weapon. They go to the Bible as foemen to Springfield Armory or Troy Arsenal, demanding-so many swords, rifles, and columbiads. They were made in the same mould as Morrissey, the pugilist, and should long ago have been sent to Congress. Like Nebuchadnezzar, they have claws, and, like him, ought to go to grass. In the day when the lamb and the lion lie down together, we fear these men will be out with a pole trying to stir up the animals.

Here are brethren who devote themselves to the explaining of the unexplainable parts of the Scripture. Jonah’s whale comes just In time to yield them whole barrels of blubber. They can explain why It was that Jonah was not digested by the whale. The gastric juice

having no power to act upon a living body, It did not dissolve the fibrine or coagulated albumen Into chyme, and consequently it could not pass the pyloric orifice of the stomach. Beside, this was an intelligent whale, and probably knew that he had swallowed a minister who had a call to Nineveh, and never had any intention of turning him into whale, but rather to prepare him for that class of ministers who are lachrymose, and on all occasions disposed to blubber. We have heard men explain this miracle by natural laws until we felt ourselves attacked by the same sickness that disturbed the leviathan of the Mediterranean when he suddenly graduated the prophet; and we felt sure that if, in an unguarded moment, we had swallowed a Jonah, he would have had good prospects of speedy deliverance.

Our expounder must also explain the ass that spake to Balaam. The probability is that the animal had originally been endowed with powers of vocalization, but, being of a lethargic temperament, had never until that day found sufficient inducement to express himself; the probability being that this animal always retained the faculty of speech, and was married, and that he has a long line of descendants, who still, like the one of the Scriptures, are disposed to criticize ministers.

Here is another brother who devotes forty Sundays of the year to the Apocalypse. He has put his lip to all the trumpets and examined all the vials. He understands them all. He reads the history of the present day in Revelation, and finds there Louis Napoleon, Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, and General Grant.

Now, all Scripture is to be expounded as far as possible; but one part is not to absorb attention to the neglect of others. Let us not be so pleased with the lily that Christ points out in his sermon that we cannot see the raven that flies past; nor while we examine the salt to find if it has lost its savor, forget to take the candle from under the bushel. The song of the morning stars at the creation must have response in the Doxology of the hundred and forty and four thousand. David’s harp and the resurrection trumpet are accordant. The pennon swung from the cedar masts of ships of Tarshlsh must be answered by the sail of fishing -boat on Genesareth. Into this great battle for God we are to take Gideon’s sword, and David’s sling, and the white horse of Victory on which Immanuel triumphs. Hiddekel and Jordan must be confluent. Pisgah and Moriah, Sinai and Calvary, must all stand in the great Scriptural ranges. No solo or quartette in this Bible music, but the battle- chorus of all the patriarchs, prophets, evangelists, and apostles. In the wall of heaven are beautifully blended jasper and emerald, beryl and sardonyx, amethyst and chrysoprasus. No one doctrine, however excellent, must be ridden constantly. The pulpit is the most unfit place in all the world for a hobby.

Let us glance at our literary hobbies. There is no grander field than that of just criticism. Through Edinburgh Review Noon Talfourd pours the sunlight of his genius upon William Hazlitt and Mackenzie, so that we know not which to be most thankful for, essayist, novelist, or critic. Christopher North breaks in like a new summer upon Thomson’s “Seasons.” Archibald Alison lifted up the works of magnificent Chateaubriand from comparative obscurity into the admiration of all nations. Walter Scott, hieing away from Abbotsford with the sheriff after him, may have had his nerves soothed by what Francis Jeffrey kindly wrote about “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

But harsh criticism is the only mood of some literati. They never add anything to the world’s literature, but have an endless pique against those who do. They take up the poem that cost five years of application, and run their pen across the cantos, and throw it aside, saying, “I have finished that fellow: hand us another! “They are provoked because Thiers and Disraeli will not lay still after being by them assassinated. Long ago these literary skull-breakers demolished George Eliot for writing” Adam Bede,” and yet she dares to attempt “The Spanish Gipsy.” They spend their life in hunting for something to chew up: goats browsing on morning-glories. They sit in the southwest corner of magazines like spiders waiting for flies. After a while they sting themselves to death with their own poison. They act as though some Herod had sent them forth to massacre all literary productions of two years and under. They seem to have adopted the sentiment of a Scotch Review: ‘’There is nothine of which nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of the codfish with a vicious fecundity that requires destruction.”

There were literary men who begrudged John Mitford the piece of old carpet under which he slept. Marwaux had nothing but denunciation for Moliere. Cowley found great satisfaction in rasping Chaucer. Pope flew in a rage at Colley Cibber. Fielding saw no power in Richardson. Johnson said that he “would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of Milton twice.” The accomplished Edinburgh Revieiu impales on one ramrod Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and Washington Irving, as dunces. Montesquieu died from the stab of a critic’s pen. Berkeley, Reid, Goldsmith, Jeremy Taylor, and Chillingworth had the hounds after them. Some of the orrandest men and women that ever lived have been crushed under the critic’s hobby.

We have found people in parlor and street on a conversational hobby. Weddings, and funerals, and harvest homes, it was reconstruction, or the follies of the administration, or the dishonesty of officials, or the degeneration of society, or the wonderful exploits of their canary-bird, or the sagacity of their gray-hound, which at the first whistle comes frisking and bounding, his muddy paws on your white suit, attesting his powers of discrimination. We knew a man who would occupy your time in describing his herd of swine. Indeed, some of them were genuine Suffolks. Other gentlemen took you to the cabinet of curiosities brought from foreign travel; he invited you to the piggery. We could get him on no other topic. Once we thought we had him cornered for a religious interview, but he turned upon us with irresistible emphasis, and said, “Dominie! I will send you half a hog! “The bristling porkers of Gadara were possessed by Satanic influence, but this man was possessed by the porkers. That one of the herd which had been most neglectful of its ablutions, and least particular about Its style of diet, was beautiful to him. ‘’Just look at that fellow!” he would say. “What an eye — eh? See him craunch that pumpkin!” An animal with legs so short, and jaws so long, and bristles so sharp, and toilet so imperfect, is not fit for a hobby.

With others the continuous theme is ventilation. We have wrecked too many sermons and lectures on ill-ventilated audience-rooms, not to understand the value of pure air. There are not twenty properly ventilated lecture-halls east of the Allegheny Mountains. We have more veneration for every other antiquity than for stale air. Atmosphere that has been bottled up for weeks is not quite equal to “Balm of Thousand Flowers.” Give us an old log across the stream to sit on, rather than an arm-chair in the parlor that is opened chiefly on Christmas and Thanksgiving Days. While waiting for this year’s turkey to get browned, we do not want to smell last year’s. There are church-basements so foul that we think some of those who frequent them for devotion get sooner to the end of their earthly troubles than they would if there were less dampness in the walls; some of them suffering from what they suppose to be too much religion, when it is nothing but wind-colic. Still we may put too long a stress upon ventilation. Here is a man who sits with the doors open, and while your teeth are chattering with cold, descants on the bracing weather. He sleeps with all his windows up, with the thermometer below zero. His prescription for all the world’s diseases is fresh air. And if the case be chronic, and stubborn, and yields not to the first course of treatment, then — more fresh air. If the patient die under the process, the adviser will say, “This confirms my theory! Don’t you see the difficulty? His only want was capacity to take in the air!”

Witticism is the hobby of another. We admire those who have power to amuse. We cannot always have the corners of our mouth drawn down. Puns are not always to be rejected. We should like to have been with Douglas Jerrold when his friend said to him, “I had a curious dinner — cajves tails!’ And Jerrold instantly replied, ‘’ Extiemes meet!’’

But we cannot always have the corners of our mouth drawn up. We can all of us stand humor longer than wit. Humor is pervasive; wit explosive. The one smiles; the other

13 K laughs. Wit leaps out from ambush; humor melts out of a summer sky. Wit hath reactions of sadness; humor dies into perpetual calm. Humor is an atmosphere full of electricity; wit is zigzag lightning. They both have their mission, but how tedious the society of the merry - andrew and professed epigrammatist! The muscles of your face weary in attempts to look pleased. You giggle, and simper, and titter, and chuckle, and scream, and slap your hand on the table, but you do not laugh. You want information, facts, realities, as well as fun. Theodore Hook and Charles Lamb Qrrinned themselves into melancholy. Clowns are apt to be hypochondriac. The company of two or three so - called witty chaps is as gloomy to us as the furnishingroom of an undertaker. It is the earnest man, with an earnest work to do, who in unexpected moment puts the pry of his witticism under your soul, and sends you roaring with a laughter that shuts your eyes, and rends your side, and makes you thankful for stout waistcoat, which seems to be the only thing that keeps you from explosion into ten thousand quips, quirks, epigrams, repartees, and conundrums. Working men have a right to be facetious. We have no objection to a hen’s cackle, if it has first laid a large round for the breakfast-table. But we had on our farm a hen that never did anything but cackle. The most rousing wit ever uttered was by stalwart men like Robert South and Jean Paul Richter. With them wit was only the foaming flake on the wave that carried into port a magnificent cargo. It was only the bell that rang you to a banquet of stalled ox and muscovy. But lackaday! if when at the ringing of the bell we went to find nothine but a cold slice of chuckle, a hash of drollery, jokes stewed, and jokes stuffed, and jokes panned, and jokes roasted, and jokes with gravy, and jokes without gravy. Professor Wilson, the peerless essayist, could afford to put on “Sporting Jacket,” and mould the snow - ball for the “Bicker of Pedmount,” and go a picnicking at Windermere, and shake up into rollicking glee Lockhart, Hamilton, Gillies, and his other Blackwood cronies, if, in that way refreshed for toil, he could come into the University of Edinburgh to mould and shape die heart and Intellect of Scotland, with a magic touch that will be felt a thousand years. He is the most entertaining man who mixes in proper proportions work and play. We prefer a solid horse, spirited and full of fire, but always ready to pull: somewhat skittish on a December morning, but still answering to the bit: while capable of taking you out of the dust of the man who does not want you to pass, yet willing to draw ship-timber; in preference to a frisky nag that comes from the stall sideways, and backward, getting up into the stirrups of his own saddle, and throwing you off before you get on. The first is a useful man’s facetlousness; the last Is a joker’s hobby.

Pride of ancestry Is with others the chief mania. Now we believe In royal blood. It Is a orrand thino- to have the rieht kind of kindred. There is but little chance for one badly born. If we belonged to some families that we know of, we would be tempted at once to give ourselves up to the police. But while far from despising family blood, we deplore the fact that so many depend entirely upon heraldry. They have not been In your company a minute before they begin to tell you who their father was and their mother. The greatest honor that ever happened to them was that of having been born. It Is a congratulation that there was but one mechanic In their line, and he helped build the first steamboat. They were no possible relation to one Simon, a tanner. The only disgraceful thing in their line, as far back as they can trace It, was that their first parents In Paradise were gardeners. There was a big pile of money somewhere back, a coat of arms, and several fine carriages. They feel sorry for Adam, because he had no grandfather. To hear them talk you would suppose that the past was crowded with their great progenitors, who were lords, and dukes, comrades of Wellington, accustomed to slapping George Washington on the shoulder, calling him by the first name; “hail fellow well met” with Thomas Jefferson. As If It had taken ten generations of great folks to produce one such Smythe. He Is no relation to Smith. That family spell, their name differently. But you find that In the last seventeen hundred years diere were several breaks In die broadclodi. Do not say anythinof about their Uncle Georoe. Confound the fellow! He was a blacksmith. Nor ask about Cousin Rachel. Miserable thing! She is In the poorhouse. Nor Inquire about his grandfather’s politics. He was a Tory. Nor ask what became of his oldest brother. He was shot In a hen-roost. Several of the family practised in the High Courts of the United States and England — as criminals. One of their kindred, was a martyr to chlrography, having written the name of John Rathbone & Co. under a promissory note, and written It so well that John Rathbone & Co. were jealous, and seriously objected. But all this is nothing, so long as they spell Smith with a jj, in the middle and an e at the end. They have ahvays moved in the circle of the RIttenhouses, and the Minturns, and the Grinnells, and the Vanderbllts. They talk much of their silver plate to everybody save the assessor. In the year 1 700 they had an ancestor that rode In the carriage with a duchess. »Yet a boy one day had the audacity, with a piece of chalk, to erase the armorial bearings from the side of their coach, and, in allusion to the industrial pursuits charged on certain members of that high family, sketched in place thereof, as coat of arms, a bar of soap and a shoe-last. Oh! this awful age of homespun and big knuckles! We would all have gone back farther than we have in search of ancestral stars and garters, crest and scutcheon, but we are so afraid of falling into kettles of tried tallow, and beds of mortar, and pans of dish-water.

But we are all proud. We slept one night at the West in the rustic house of President Fillmore’s father, in the very bed occupied the week before by Daniel Webster and the President. We felt that we must carry off from that room a memento. Not able to get anything more significant, we brought away from the peg in the room one of old Mrs. Fillmore’s cap-strings. It was with no ordinary emotions that, after coming down into every-day life, we displayed the trophy.

Still how distasteful Is the companionship of one who is always on the subject of his high associations and honored ancestry. We get vexed, and almost wish that their ancestors had been childless. At proper times and to proper decree let such themes be discussed, but what a folly to be on all occasions displaying Mrs. Fillmore’s cap-strings! It is an outrageous case of cruelty to animals when a man persists in having all his progenitors join him in riding the ancestral hobby.

Now it so happened that on one occasion all these hobbyists met on one field. What a time! Ten hobbies ridinor aoainst each other in cavalry charge! Each rider was determined to carbine all the others. The allopathist loaded his gun with blue pills; the homceopathist loaded his with pulsatilla and stramonium. The hypochondriac unsheathed his sharpest pains for the onset. The temperance monomaniac struck right and left with an ale-pitcher. The tobacco fanatic threw snuff into the eyes of those who could not see as he did. The controversialist and critic hung across the saddle a long string of scalps they had taken. The buffoon bespattered the whole regiment with a volley of poor jokes. And the man of distinguished ancestry attempted to frighten the combatants from the field by riding- up with a hobby that had on its back the resurrected skeletons of all his forefathers.

Too much hobby-riding belittles the mind, distorts the truth, and cripples influence. All our faculties were made for use. He who is always on one theme cannot give full play to judgment, imagination, fancy, reason, wit, and humor. We want harmony of intellect — all the parts carried, treble, alto, tenor, and base, accompanied by full orchestra, sackbut, violoncello, cornet, drum, flute, and cymbals. He who goes through life using one faculty, hops on one foot, instead of taking the strong, smooth gait of a healthy walker. He who, finding within him powers of satire, gives himself up to that, might as well turn into a wasp and go to stinging the bare feet of children. He who is neglectful of all but his imaginative faculty, becomes a butterfly flitting idly about till the first “black frost” of criticism kills it. He who devotes himself to fun-making, will find the better parts of his soul decaying, and his temporary attractiveness will be found to be the phosphorescence of rotten wood. He who disports himself in nothing but dialectics and mathematics, w’ll get badly hooked by the horns of a dilemma, and after a while turn into trapezoids and parallelograms — his head a blackboard for diagrams in spherical geometry — and, while the nations are dying, and myriad voices are crying for help, will find their highest satisfaction in demonstrating that if two angles on equal spheres are mutually equilateral, they are xViMM2yly equiatigulaj’: the flying missiles in a South American earthquake to him are only brilliant examples in conic sections; the one describing a parabola, that an ellipse, the other a hyperbola.

When God has given us so many faculties to use, why use only one of them? With fifty white palfreys to ride, why go tilting a hobby?

He who yields to this propensity never sees the whole of anything. There is no sin in all the earth but slavery, or intemperance, or municipal dishonesty. All the sicknesses would be healed if they would take our medicine. The only thing needed to make the world what it ought to be, is a new pavement on our sidewalk. The nations are safe as soon as we can bring to an end the expectorations of tobacco-juice. All that we can see of anything is between the leather pricked-up ears of our hobby.

This frantic urging on of our pet notion will come to nought. Our prancing charger will sink down with lathered flanks and we be passed on the road by some Scotch Presbyterian, astride a plain draught-horse that has been pasturing in the field next to the kirk, jogging along at an easy pace, knowing it has been elected that he is to reach the kingdom.

Brethren! let us take a palm-leaf and cool off! Let your hobby rest. If it will not otherwise stop, tie it for a few days to the whitewashed stump of modern conservatism. Do not hurry things too much. If this world should be saved next week, it would spoil some of our professions. Do not let us do up things too quick. This world is too big a ship for us to guide. I know from the way she swings from larboard to starboard that there is a strong Hand at the helm. Be patient. God’s clock strikes but once or twice in a thousand years; but the wheels all the while

HOBBIES.

keep turning. Over the caravanserai of Bethlehem, with silver tongue, it struck one. Over the University of Erfurt, Luther heard it strike NINE. In the rockings of the present century it has sounded eleven. Thank God! It will strike twelve!