"I' I were as rich as old Elwes, I never would have been such a miser," said a penniless man, one day, when that noted character came upon the carpet; "of all beings, the miser is the least useful in social life."

"'If you were as rich, you would not be as useful as old Elwes was; that is what you express, or you mistake the real state of the case," said Moreton; "a miser is a useful man in society-none more so: he is no man's enemy but his own."

"Some people are fond of paradoxes."

"True; but here is none. You intend that 'if' you were as rich as old Elwes was, you would spend the money he saves. So many say that a prodigal is better than a miser, because he scatters abroad his wealth. Now, 'if' old Elwes accumulated his rents, turned them into gold, and locked them up in an iron chest, there might be some ground for a charge of uselessness against him; but old Elwes did no such thing: he accumulated money by supplying the wants of those who had need of it; and thus, while he increased his store, he contributed his share to the good of the general mass. As nothing is made in vain, no one lives in vain."

"I cannot understand that doctrine."

"A miser always makes interest of his money, or employs it in some mode by which others may make their interest upon it. Consuming little himself, he only enables others to consume more, because he has, from this very cause of self-privation, so much more to hand over to others for beneficial purposes. He is only a less customer to the butcher and wine merchant, that he may be the larger trader with others in loans, or houses, or lands. If you were as rich as he, it is very doubtful whether you would really benefit the commonwealth as much. Stinting his stomach is his own affair; and of what he saves that way he is enabled, by its augmentation, to lend, or build, or take mortgages more extensively, for the aid of others, though unconscious of any end but gratifying his own love of accumulation."

"Then would you have me infer that a miser is as good a member of the community as a liberal man, living well and spending his income generously?"

"Precisely so; he lives with more respect to

himself, and more becomingly. Society receives from both a modicum of gain, for it is not permitted to any individual to withhold his share of contribution to the general advantage, however repulsive to the common idea of what is consistent and proper his private conduct may be. Common notions, too, are very often as erroneous upon many other subjects connected with social existence as upon the present."

"'IF' I were a young man again, I would never let a pretty face entrap me into a marriage. I would seek wealth, or the means of living substantially, before I tied the Gordian knot. Young men will, in process of time, grow wiser, getting into a habit of reflection, and then we shall ses no marriages but such as are grounded upon an accurate calculation of the means of living."

"This 'if' is a fallacy, too; for, 'if' the utterer of such an opinion were a young man of generous feelings, he would do no such thing. It is precisely because age has displaced youth, and caution stifled the generosity and kindness of early years, that this 'if' obtrudes itself."

"If I were Alexander, I would accept the offer of Darius." "So would I," replied the king, "if I were Parmenio."

Many promulgators of this apparently reasonable doctrine, so far as social benefit appears to be concerned, are those whom cold calculations have led to adopt the fallacious notion, that the world is to be governed by the dictates of a reason that can apply only to temporary circumstances and peculiar localities. Nature is not to be thus subjugated. Were the national debt quadrupled for some state object, and a marriage life quadrupled in difficulty of maintenance for a family, is it to be supposed, as some tell us in substance, that we should not then marry in the proportion of three-fourths to those who marry now? The natural course of things is not to be changed, because of the straits into which a bad system of any kind may bring us. It is better and sounder reason to change the system, than to attempt to force nature in obedience to circumstances caused by human vices or errors.

"If you were a young man, you would be under the rule of early impulses, as you are now of later ones. You would marry-it is your natural course. How the world is to be depeopled,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is no business of ours.

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All human impulses are subject, unconsciously, to a better reason than that of which some persons boast; therefore, 'if' you were a young man, you would do as young men have always done." "'IF' I were to live my life over again, I would never act so unthinkingly as I did before I was forty years of age." The question must be begged here, that the quantity of passion should be uniform, and that the young men should be no more inclined to obey present temptation than the old ones, who can philosophize so wisely from the want of it. If the recollection of former experience could be preserved, the temptations of the former position must be resisted. It would not be sufficient to know, we must be able to subdue natural feelings, in order to act differently from what we did before. Who could insure this?

We know not, then, what we wish in applying the "I" in this way. We should, there is no doubt, live our term nearly in the same way again, aggravated by the torturing of conscience that we every day knew better than we acted. No wise man would ever live his life over again as he had lived it; it would surely be a dreadful aggravation of such a second course of existence to pass through it with continual mental upbraiding, arising out of the memory of the experience we had received, the guidance of which we were unable to follow. In such cases, we know not what we desire; and the "IF" is the happiest word for our natures that language, in such cases, can muster.

"I" is described by a great author as a “hypothetical particle"-in set terms, a word forever begging the question. When it begins a sentence or a speech, it would be well that we asked ourselves whether the conclusion or inference upon so uncertain a proposition were worth entering upon? It is a mere waste of words to say, "'IF' I had ten thousand a year, I would do such and such a thing." This is the vanity of wishing carried out to a waste of time. Lord Chesterfield calculated the waste of time caused by snufftaking to be no inconsiderable portion of human life. The time consumed in expressing sentences with hypothetical particles may be set down as an important portion of the waste of human existence.

The French have a castle and island called "IF," near Marseilles. That word signifies the "yew" in French-the funereal yew-no, bad hint in the way of a memento of the certain termination of hypotheses in behalf of human wishes beginning with that particle. The poet or fairy. tale maker might amusingly enough make “Ir” the residence of the army of phantasmic hypotheses we are continually conjuring up under some

sovereign phantom of an hypothesis, enchanted and happily regnant to the sight, with a crown of gold studded with rubies and emeralds, in the most imposing array, such as Arabian fertility of imagination has depicted in "The Thousand and One Nights," but all, like Dead Sea apples, fair in the rind or externally, while only bitter dust and ashes are within. Sir William Temple has used "if" hypothetically in the very best way of the scholar and philosopher, when he says, "Who would not be covetous, and with reason, 'IF' health could be purchased with gold? Who not ambitious, 'IF' if it were at the command of power, or restored by honor?"

Some uses of "if" sting well under the bypothesis. "I shall get justice," says a suitor, "if I can find an honest lawyer: 'if' notnot." The Chinese have an excellent thing of this sort. A boy was so dull he could not half fill his sheet of exercise, and was punished. "Ah!" said he, “if I could have filled up the blank part, I should not have been beaten.” “No, no; if you had done that," said a fellowscholar, looking over what he had completed→ "if you had filled the sheet as you began, you would have been flogged to death."

Another jest of theirs is too good to omit. A schoolmaster was employed to transcribe the of fices for the dead by a man who had lost his mother-in-law, and copied by mistake the prayers for a father-in-law. When they came to be recited, the father-in-law found it out. The man was angry with the scribe. "Are not thes offices appointed for those cases which I have carefully transcribed?" said the schoolmaster. "That's authority, I think. There can be no mistake; if there be, it lies with you, not me. Is it not the wrong person died? 'IF' so, that is no fault of mine!"

Sometimes the hypothesis "IF is employed upon a nonentity, and the intended inference is no inference or consequence at all. Thus, "If the sky fall, we shall catch larks," is a common proverb; but what is the sky! An hypothesis itself-a non-existent, which cannot have a consequence without a brother: thus, “If' a sky there be, then 'if' the sky fall, we shall catch larks." The ancients made a better thing of it when they said, "You reckon with those who say 'if' heaven should fall."

"Ir" belongs to the language of the early part of life, being Hope's own monosyllable. We make little comparative use of it, having arrived at the age when, as the wise man says, "The grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the window be darkened." The word was left in the bottom of Pandora's box;

it was labeled upon the packet which enveloped Hope's philtre, the most dangerous of our mortal potions, because it costs us less suffering to recover from its deepest draughts. Like Hope, it is a constant refuge upon all occasions of good or evil, its hypothetic character being admirably adapted to every exigency. "If' I had not been a fool, and got drunk yesterday, I had escaped this intolerable headache." "* 'If' I had but listened to the advice of my friend Tomkins, I had saved a thousand pounds."

On the other hand, it may be said truly, to quote Shakspeare, "If' thou talkest to me of 'ifs,' thou art a traitor!" The word is a veil for all sorts of uncharitablenesses and iniquities "If" is a great nurse of discontent. "If I had

but that nice field-that fine house!" "If I could but find a pot of money!" "If I can but conquer Asia and Africa, I will return and live merrily," said Pyrrhus; but Cyneas told him he might do that as it was, and Pyrrhus saw the ad

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vice was good. "If I can make a plum more," says the merchant. "If' I had but one estate more," says the landowner. Now it would be a useful thing to change the unreal desire into real contentedness; and diminishing the wish for more, leave the hypothetic particle in this use of it to those less wise.

Perchance we tire the reader, and may be considered to do some injustice to a very innocent word; and in truth we must plead guilty, in a certain respect, to the charge. After all, it is the wrong application from which we extract matter of blame; and the best things may be ill-used, as is well illustrated in the history of our friends, the tee-totalers. With them wine is banned; not, we presume, from any distaste of the thing itself, but for fear they should be tempted to abuse it, feeling the frailty of their natures. They are, therefore, perfectly right "if" they wholly abstain.

THERE is not a movement takes place in this great universe of mind and matter, but influences, in some degree, the condition of something else; and yet the general mind has seldom perceived the character or degree of the most important movements. The motion of the stellar bodies, as they sweep round the throne of God, does not interest the crowd so much as the whizz of a sky-rocket; and the court-circular, with its stereotyped assurance that "the royal family and the royal ponies took an airing in the park this morning," is more eagerly read than the observations of Humboldt or the prelections of Chalmers. The march of warriors, and the peregrinations of puppet-shows, are most important movements in this visible world, and draw the wondering eyes of crowds; while heaven's meteors dance over the gold-spangled tapis of the sky, and the spheres sing their eternal melodies as the dullard world sleeps. The intellectual heroes of the world have no heralds nor aids to blow a trumpet before them, and bid the world stare at them as they go; they pass along the highway of life like other people, undistinguishable save to those who possess common attributes and the clairvoyance of sympathy; yet their footsteps leave tracks behind them which posterity gazes on with awe, and which, as it gazes, it puts its feet into. Theirs are the plastic motions which stamp ideas in the van-path of humanity, as plainly as did the great feet of the primeval cormorants write lessons of an intelligent Creator on the transition formations. The eye does not know them, but they live to and for souls. One of the most earnest and commanding spirits of the intellectual empire of the present time, is George Gilfillan, whose recently-issued volume, "The Bards of the Bible," summons the reader to the study of thoughts and truths of surpassing interest and moment. One of the most striking and earnest of the truths he insists upon, is the honorable place which the Word of God should occupy in literature, and the vital connection which subsists between religion and letters. Some of his thoughts are so germane to the great idea of our magazine, and so urgently important, that we eliminate a few of the more bearing upon the point. Our readers require not to be informed that Mr. Gilfillan is a highly distinguished critic and author; he, however, occupies

a much more important and interesting position than this. Young, strong, and full of prophetic fire, he is shouting to those who dwell in Zion, "The Philistines are on thee;" and, full of faith and earnestness, he dashes into the coteries and cliques of literature, and cries, "The Spirit of Christ should be here." Mr. Gilfillan is a man of genius, original, genial, and generous, who would see Christianity extend its activities through all the extent of the social world, and the pulpit become less the censor than the sister of science and literature.

We find, says he, science, literature, and religion, connected together in the Word of God. The Bible, is not, indeed, a scientific book, nor does it profess or display scientific method, even when it treats of religious topics. And yet it cannot be remarked with too much admiration, that it has never yet been proved to contradict any main principle of scientific truth. It has been subjected, along with many other books, to the fire of the keenest investigation—a fire which has contemptuously burned up the cosmogony of the Shaster, the absurd fables of the Koran-nay, the husbandry of the Georgics, the historical truth of Livy, the artistic merit of many a popu lar poem, the authority of many a book of philosophy and science. And yet, there this artless, loosely piled little book lies, unhurt, untouched, with not one page singed; and not even the smell of fire has passed upon it. ""Tis past conjecture, all things rise in proof." This book is the mirror of the Divinity-the rightful regent of the world. Other books are planets shining with reflected lustre-this book, like the sun, shines with ancient and unborrowed ray. Other books have, to their loftiest altitudes, sprung from earth-this book looks down from heaven high. Other books appeal to understanding or fancy— this book to conscience and faith. Other books solicit our attention-this book demands it; it speaks with authority, and not as the scribes. Other books guide gracefully along the earth, or onwards to the mountain summits of the idealthis, and this alone, conducts up the awful abyss which leads to heaven. Other books, after shining their little season, may perish in flames fiercer than those which consumed the Alexandrian library-this, in essence, must remain pure as geld and unconsumable as asbestos, amid the flames of