Mus currie plenum sed contra' meum magnum ad, Let not the lover of old Latin lore fondly imagine that he has found a zeé- 4é curio in the above lines, for he has not. The expression is an excerpt from a boy's " Essay on a Mouse." Wishing to state that one of these small animals "ran full tilt against my great toc," and remembering no equivalent for #/t, his resourceful mind hit on the synonym butt" which he forthwith wrote sed.
An examination of the passage. will reveal the fact that it is largely unhampered by what are known as rules, and hat the youngster formulated certain principles ad "i. which if adopted generally would revolutionize the whole world of grammar. The rapid conversion of the inoffending preposition into a digital noun, which almost leads one to suppose that the young hopeful was writing Chinese instead of Latin Grammar, would have done credit to the Great Napoleon. Tore is, however, in the composition evidence of fearlessness and dash which one can almost admire, one admires the chess. playing first Consul, who had the habit of making chess rules of his own as the game proceeded.
The common consent of mankind has agreed that rules are necessary. happens then that we are, all of us, hampered, hemmed in, hedged in, bound by them. We have rules of society, rules of law, rules of chess, rules of everything, embracing the whole field from Turveydrop to Blackstone and Lindley Murray. Our education is a great deal more than the drawing out of the faculties; it is the shaping, the flagellation of the whole life and being, according to certain regulations which n ancient consensus communist has declared good. An educated sensibility quickly detects every infraction of rule, and the impact of broken laws upon such sensibilities produces nervousness which is bodily, mental, or spiritual. By this statement, we do not mean to provoke a metaphysical discussion as to whether the nervous kingdom, like Gaul in the time of Julius Caesar, is divided into three parts. We leave the point to the consciousness of the intelligent if not gentle reader, and fraught though the subject—that hyper-nervousness is hyper-education—may be, we relegate the question to the same convenient and desirable locality. The mental and- spiritual horizon of Europeans is more or less circumscribed by fact; in such a way, however, that the imagination, will, and emotions are permitted a wholesome free-play. Com paratively very few seriously. realise how much he himself particularly and every body else generally has been touched and moulded in every department of his lawful life, by the influence of one Book. In the dark room of heathenism, the contact with people whose lives have been cast in another mould, or rather have not been moulded at all, develops this impression (to use a photographic figure) into a clearly defined picture.
There seems to be neither horizon, zenith, nor nadir to the Chinese imagitation. In so far as supernatural rules are concerned, it is untrammelled. Esteriorly the Chinese seem quiet and unimaginative, and many authors have defined them as such, just as old John Willit defined Barnaby Rudge as having no imagination whatever. But under the "watermelon" cap of John Chinaman, there play ideas not yet dreamed of by the neophytic European—ideas of his own as well*as those that have been bequeathed by a hoary-headed and limitless ancestry. The belief in metempsychosis introduces and contributes a new clement and factor in births, deaths, and the routine of daily life. The poet Coleridge may possibly have held such ideas when he apostrophised a young ass, "I hail thee brother." To the Chinese mind it is fairly within the limits of a wide possibility that the same young ass was the transmigrated grandfather of the writer, who, in this effort, at least,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.