SELF-FORMATION.

As regards value, these volumes are pretty much what we pro- nounced them to be from a hasty glance some months ago; but their literary merit is far greater than we concluded from the same opportunity of forming a judgment. The author is a thoughtful, self-observing man ; he is well read in various branches of lite- rature—especially, we should say, in our old divines; from whom be has acquired something of their fulness, quaintness, and accu- mulative style of description. He is also fresh, and earnest in his task; and, though exhibiting a power of making much out of little, which many a bookmaker might envy, there is nothing at all of the bookmaker about him. " Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." Self-Formation is a very minute mental autobiography ; in which the writer narrates, at a disproportionate if not a wearisome length, the different circumstances which have contributed to ex- pand his ideas, to determine his studies, and to influence the growth of his opinions and the formation of his mind. He has done this, he tells us, that others may profit by his failings, and be guided through intellectual difficulties to intellectual success. We must however say, that lie appears to "have imagined a vain thing." There is nothing in his mind, its development, or the circumstances attending his career, which demands narration, much less a very elaborate narration. The chief mental qualifi- cations the autobiographer possesses are a strong memory, con-

siderable powers of reflection, and an earnest self-will. His judg- ment, especially in matters relating to himself', is not always of the soundest ; he has hardly a particle of that large discrimination which, looking at things both in themselves and their circum- stances, is not only able to form a true but a relative opinion as to their nature, weight, and value. Of' genius lie cannot be said to have any; but he seems to possess a nervous temperament

AN 01 D GARDEN.

Awl then, tee. there was the earden ! Oh that delicious carder.! bow I leeed it. Ami 1:1, tin' It.,, 43y, p'rel.,:.1ee something the more, for its qr.:ratr,e its to to ethers. its a-pert of deeoletion, and most admired disorder. It wes exactly what c.:1 Evein would have called a cerilen bosearesqiie, with oaks, elms, and all the. tee. s ..f the fo.est growing. over it at their proud plea- sure. These overbeariee inveders Had moirpil the eeil. and dislodged the proper anal original occupiers of it. They frowned darkly alai continually, till they hal frewned l'omuna tram their presence. They had effectually suppressed the aspiring ambition of the fruit-trees, and taught them the virtue or humility.

" Weil. if you must needs Bras," so they seemed to say, " why not sun your-

selves in our sh :" lean you this a earthen?" says the critic, "faith, then, from this time I must call every wilderness of bramble-bushes a paradise." To be sure, acorns, and horse-chesnuts, and tir.cones, were in greater plenty there than pears and apples : the low, rascally little herb thrift was nowhere within the precincts. But still, be there ever so little fruit, the schoolboy is first served ; and, for the better achievement of my marauding purposes, I could lie in ambush over every part of the garden, as secretly and securely as though I had been in the liercynian forest. And then there were yew hedges, of "im- memorial growth," and a fine chesnut avenue fur the squirrels, and a sheet of water, and shrubberies, and orchards and meadows, lying about in wide-spread prodigality, and ministering ample occasion to my untoward spirit, whether fo mischief or meditation.

THE OLD AND MODERN MEN OF LETTERS.

My father, though by vocation a professional man, was really, by taste and habit, neither more nor less titan a devoted man of letters, not one of your lite. rary men of the present day, made up of pliancy, versatility, and general but superficial cleverness; adventurers ready for any thing and fit for nothing ; men who think it the very perfection of authorship to be an courant du four in all its frivolities and fashions ; who compose, not from the fulness of their minds, but from that of their flipppancy and self-conceit ; writing, because they have not the patience to read, and making it the point of their ambition to be esteemed fine gentlemen rather than fine thinkers; who give themselves as many airs as though they expected their books to be handled only in perfumed gloves ; and, from their silly affectation of becoming all things to all men, hare done as much as in them lies to degrade the man of letters into the mere ape of fashion,—in short, literally Greeks—the representatives of the old class of ad- venturers so spiritedly portrayed by Juvenal. My father, truly, was another manner of man than these—a being of a far higher and nobler order. He be. longed rather to a class, now almost extinct, whose world was in their library; a race "unteachable in worldly skill," mere children in the art of pushing these fortunes ; and yet, as guardians of public morality and trainers of the public mind, at least us trustworthy as their successors, those harlequin successors with whom motley's the only wear." Such a one was my father. In the moram duke +lidos et agendi semita simpler, in that single line is the sum of his life anti disposition ; or, reader, if you like prose better, you have Lim here to the very reality of representation, in the short sketch of Pliny : Scholastic*:

which is apt to produce the sensitiveness of genius without its strength—its flutter without its powers of flight. or are the development, or the circumstances which caused it, of any extraordinary singularity—nothing more than happens to any thoughtful boy of talent, who is distinguished ever so little beyond his fellows. The father of our autobiographer was a re- tired lawyer, who had renounced all hopes of forensic distinction for the sake of literary leisure. His son was brought up at his

country residence—a roomy old manor-house, with a large ne- glected garden and grounds; where he wandered freely, indulging childish fancies, and nursing a love of solitude. His mother taught him to read ; his father undertook to educate him, but ne- glected the task ; and lie was sent first to a private school, an thence to Eton. At both these places he had, like the rest of uss his boyish griefs and rubs and difficulties. At Eton, and subse- quently at Cambridge, incidents occurred that modified or revolu- tionized his views. By a sudden light, as it were, he apprehended things that had long troubled or perplexed him. His first efforts at composition and thinking were painful failures : but in due time, by dint of practice and frequent intervals of suspension, he acquired ease, and such dexterity as he possesses. When he studied hard, he gained a knowledg,e of letters proportioned to his efforts,—unless he over-studied, when his mind was unable to digest his reading. If lie neglected his studies for Eton sports or the more boisterous dissipations of college, he found that, what be lost in knowledge of letters, he gained in worldly experience and self-confidence; contemplation raising and expanding, action hardening and sharpening the mind; and nothing occurring from which a reflective intellect may not derive same benefit. Things analoeous to these, everybody with a min l has experienced, whe- ther he may have remembered and reflected upon them or not; but it was ant necessary- to tell them ta the world in two very closely-printed volumes, especially as the only practical lesson we can glean from theta is this artificial help to energy—hold your breath before you begin to study intently. Let it not be supposed that we undervalue the importance of a work that should truly paint the hopes and fears of childhood, and trace the growth of the intellect, from mere perception and memory, up to generalization, reflection, and judgment. But the man who could do this truly and effectively, could do other things ; and in painting a general character from which all might profit, he would paint an individual likeness, in which all would feel interested, apart from the excellence, of the portrait.

In despite of all these Failings. Self-E,nnution, however, is not an evereday work. The narrative indeed " drags its slow length along : " the author eternally digresses hem his subject ; and many of his remarks will be caviare to the impatient general reader of our days. But the book is the "outpourings of an experience : " however individual, it is real ; the writer has a strongly-marked character, and a minute and laborious fidelity of touch, winch, like the Fannish school of painters, imparts an attraction to matters unimportant in themselves. Take these pictures of an old garden and an old scholar; which, by the by, here sown lhiece Of CHARLES LAMB'S complete:less, though they cannot be called inlitatiune. toisturn est, quo goitre honanum nihil est ant simplicius, ant sineerius, out methis. His fortune was a remarkable one. Born and bred up ns the only on of his father, in a house of affluence, his health, wretchedly weak from his birth, and wasted by many organic infirmities, was sickened perhaps, rather than corrected, by the tenderness of his home indulgences. The sports and exercises of boyhood were beyond. the force or, I should say, the feebleness of his frame; and in imbuing him with a profuseness of nervous sensibility, nature seemed to have exhausted in him, as in many men of genius bowie, the filmd that should have gone, in part, to supply the other physical faculties and force d manhood. He wu debarred of all amusements else; and hence his love of books grew upon him gradually, till it occupied his whole mind. This original bias showed itself most strongly in every subsequent stage of my father's life. His love of literature was excessive. He existed for little else. If he had lived more after the example of men in his own station, he would have lived better and more happily,. He might then have corrected in some degree the feeble- ness of his health, the painful defectiveness of his sight, the sensitiveness of his temper, and the consequent peculiarities, not merely of manner, but of mind also, and of a mind in other respects noble and generous almost beyond the lot of humanity. As it was, the social advantages belonging to his circumstances were thrown away upon him. Neither the discipline of a public school, nor the indiscipline of the University, could work any great change upon his cha- racter; and even the study of the law, that most drastic of all mental processes, and surest developer of confidence, decision, and readiness, was spent upon him in vain, and left him pretty nearly as it had found him.

60LITUDE—A MENTAL PICTURE.

My spirit, thus subject to retirement, and brought up under its shadow, could hardly fail to take from it a deep, if not a dark hue. The shades predo- minated over the lights in my moral portraiture. The scenes where I was conversant, " where once my early childhood strayed," were imaged on my soul, and reflected from the stillness of its surface. I have already said that the character of my father's house, its ancestral aspect, the solemn shade of its gardens, and wilderness of its grounds, had thrown over me something of that love for solitude, which, by the common consent of poets and philosophers, is the nurse, if not the mother of genius. If it be so, it is difficult to say how I missed the gift ; how it came to pass that the wand of the enchanter was with- holden from me. I must have blundered sadly, for never was child or man put more directly in the way. Solitude was my earliest schoolmistress. I had no society, no playmates, not a pony to ride, not a dog to teaze fur my amusement, not a living creature of my own to regard or fondle. I had never known any other kind of existence, or I must have sickened, I should have died daily under such a continual load of dulness. As it was, I had no standard of comparison ; I knew not my own wretchedoeu; my ignorance was my bliss ; and though I saw nothing, and heard nothing, and did nothing new from one day to another, yet pursued the even tenor of my way without disgust or restlessness. My mind, as the poet says of the dyer's band, was subdued unto the colour wherein it wrought ; my daily habits grew up into a second nature, a sort of moral rege- ration. I went along with my course of life easily and complacently ; I be- came a willing saunterer, a lover of groves and meadows, of sunny groves and secret thickets, a curious bird-nester, a very Caliban for searching out crabs and wild strawberries, a listener to the tinkle of the sheep-bell, a gazer at the cadle in their pasture.

CHILDREN'S QUESTIONS.

It is commonly said that a child's questions are often of all others the most fficult ; and this is quite true ; simply because they go to the depths of truth, whereas we are accustomed to draw water for our daily use from the surface only—a sutrace in general, from its exposure, full of all kinds of foulness—and therefore softer mod of better accommodation to our services than the pure and clear, but somewhat bard genuineness of the spring. But the questions of children are often not only very difficult, but very displeasing also ; and this Porn the same cause, from their tendency to the very root, their sheer radicalism. As, for instance, a little boy will ask, Why does papa eat so many nice things— So much nicer than the poor people ? and, Why does he go about dressed so finely, though he never works? and, Why do the other men let him have so much land, when he says that I ought not to have for my own garden any more than I can dig with the little spade? and, Why do the poor people work for him all day, and then take their hats off to him, and call him Sir ? Why don't they take it in turns to do it, he one day and they the next ? Now, these are borne-thrusts; they are not to be parried. The only way to meet them is to blunt the weapon's point by opposing to it the defensive armour of the fool, the bard, stiff, impenetrable, ass-hided callousness of custom ; and accordingly this is dose. Don't be so troublesome; don't ask questions about what does not concern you ; nobody ever inquires of a little boy about such things, and therefore you need not know them ; or, if any answer at all be given, it is gene- rally in the form of what the lawyers call a horse-plea—I suppose because it runs away from the question ; a silly, paisley-bed evasion—a frustation instead of a reply. The child feels at once, for children are keenly sensitive of ridicule, that the purpose is to make fool of him; and the purpose is often gained. He is made a fool indeed, not merely for the moment, figuratively, but perhaps also, if the practice be continued, actually and ever after. Such is the encou- ragement given to the really commendable spirit of curiosity, the inquisitive. ness of the child after truth and right principles. The fact is, that wherever there is corruption and perversion of custom, truth and principles are the most inconvenient things imaginable. The less that is said about theirs the better, at least for dominant interests. But it is long before children can be made sensible of the convenience of such obliquities—they cannot easily shuffle themselves into the loose social habits. They know nothing of conventional phrases and opinions: they are no sophists, and therefore, in many cases, they are the best and truest of philosophers.

FEMALE CONVERSATION.

For readiness, tact, and discrimination, elegance and address, for the acquire. assent of all these good qualities, there is no school like that of female society. The lesser virtues, too, those of complaisance, kindness, and good-will, with many others allied to them, are hardly to be got elsewhere. But with these I have no business at present. I am now on the talent of conversation, and that too I may safely add to the catalogue above enumerated. The mind of woman, taken in the abstract and without reference to individuals, when we compare it with that of man, is much what the graver or penknife is to the axe. It is a thing of no great force, it can achieve no stupendous work, scarcely any thing sublime was ever compassed by it ; but, in matters of minute detail, of ready invention, of nice adjustment, of elegant though superficial execution, it is your only instrument. le hear a woman talk polities is to be sickened of them for days, or weeks, or months after, according to circumstances. This is an un- failing rule. Then, to listen to her religion is usually, though not so generally, to be reminded of the hasty curiousness of Eve. Their vivacity is too prompt and sparkling. They fill their measure with the first outbreak of their froth, and when we have waited long enough for it to subside, we look again, and be. bold ! all is emptiness. Their range, then, is a circumscribed one; but in it they are like fairies within their ring—creatures of infinite grace and power. To be much conversant with them is a thing of as much advantage for the learned man as the lessons of the fencing-master would be to the raw big-boned recruit. They would not, perhaps, add materially to his strength, but, by teaching him its full use, they would incomparably heighten its utility.