The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1858-01-19 00:00:00

Farieties.

An hour's industry will do more to beget cheerfulness,
suppress evil humours, and retrieve your affairs, than •
month's moaning.
CULINARY CON.—When is • Christmas pudding Ilk.
• pickpocket? When it's "taken up," to be sure.
Repair the Past and act the Future now.
When you bury animosity, don't set • stone up over
its grave—Forgive and forget.
PARALLEL EXISTENCE.—A secret, like an oyster,
cannot be kept too close—for the moment it is opened it
cease to exist. . . .

A SOBER PuN.—Why are temperanoe societies a bar
to friendship? Because they prevent shaking hands.

"My notions about life," Says Southey, "are much
the same so they are about travelling—there is a good
deal of amusement on the road; but, after all, one
wants to be at rest." . .

-Do" ii-ot-ie-e-d--YOUr troubles with attention, and they
will die imperoeptibly away,

An epicure, eating oysters, swallowed one that was
not fresh. " Zounds, waiter !" he ejaculated, with •
wry face, "whet sort of an oyster do you call this?'
"A native, air," replied the wielder of the lmife. "A
native !—I call it a settler, so you need not open any
more." .

Foss AND Bosna.—There is a great moral bustling
going on —school fuss, pulpit fuss, platform and post-
prandial fuss, all aiming at man's good. There is a
wonderful development of the bleeps, but somehow
the nervous stroke has yet to be given. There are cer-
tain spots in the New Forest, bare small spaces of
ground, surrounded more or less by heather, fern
growth and such like covert. At a given hour every
day a number of blackcocks are seen wending their way
to one or other of these places; on arrival there they at
once commence a sort of strutting movement, extending
their tails and showing, as birds can show, a curious
combination of evident pleasure and pride; they don't
fight, but keep up a continued kind of chant—it is
called curling,' how spelt I know not; these spaces are
known as ' curling grounds.' The meetings are of
limited duration; they then disperse, and the oldest
foresters, I believe, cannot tell why they came, what
they did beyond the noise and personal exhibition, nor
is anything left behind that any one would like to pick
up. Surely, now, men in our day do as much as these
birds do. We have political, polemical, social ' curling '
grounds we are punctual to attend, fret our hour at
the appointed spot, make the old noise, go away and re-
turn again, again to do the same, again to deplore, to
denounce, to propound, to prophesy, to theorize, eat,
drink, sleep, and accomplish—nothing.
- - - - - -

Let it never be forgotten that true delicacy consists in
purity of sentiment, and is as much superior to its sub-
stitute external manners as is a real gem to one that is
artificial.

SEAKESPEAR'S INIMISTRY.—A few years ago it might
have been thought that Shakespear ought to have no
place in a lecture on learning. We should have been
told that he was the great type, instance, of the force of
original genius without learning. Ido not anticipate
any such objection now. I think all are agreed that
historical learning, biographical learning, humane learn-
ing in the largest sense of the word, belonged to him, and
that it did not drop upon him from the clouds, that he
acquired it, that his genius enabled him to win it and
to use it, and was not in the least a substitute for it.
Most assuredly he did not obtain it in leisure or in any
school which exempted him from intercourse with the
coarsest persons and occupations. It he had merely read
the old Chronicles of England he might have commented
on them much as others have commented on him ; but
he used them to interpret the actual world in which he
lived, and so both pages became illuminated. There did
not rise up in his study a frightful abstraction called
man because it was unlike any individual creature that
has ever borne the name; there did not arise from his
empirical observations a set of walking figures labelled
French, Italian, Dane, King, poet, doctor, noted by
certain costumes and habits of speech, having nothing in
common with each other; he found in the Chronicles and
tales which he read men of all descriptions, ages, and
countries, who, because he took them to be essentially of
the same flesh and blood and to have the same life
with those whom he met in streets and taverns, pre-
sented themselves to him, and through him in a degree
to us with awful distinctness, so that we know they
were, and cannot but feel also that they are. And so
with, next to nature, antiquarian, or geographical lore,
he could yet make our own history intelligible and make
us feel the distinction of climates and races as no one
else has done. We ought not to admit for an instant
that his circumstances were unfavourable to this culti-
vation, that it was marvellous he could be what he was
belonging as he did to the people. His circumstances
were assuredly the best possible for him as those we are
born to are the best for In.—Professor F. D. Maurice.
MR. JUSTICE CRESSWELL.—The new Judge of the
Court of Probate began his Temple life with the reputa-
tion of being the Cambridge 'wooden spoon' of his
year, and yet by his midnight labours on " Barnwell's
and Creaswell's reports," laid the foundation of a legal
fame, of which the leadership of the Northern Circuit,
and an equally indisputable one as Puisne Judge of the
Common Pleas, were the glorious after fruits. Strangely
terse are his summinp up. It was but the other day, in
an action for dander, that be merely said—" Gentlemen,
the defendant seems to be a very foul-mouthed person—
what damages?" And again, when hosts of witnesses had
Spoken to character, "Gentlemen, it is evident that the
prisoner is a most respectable person, and has stolen a
broom."
LEARNING AND LEISIIRE.—The age of Elizabeth RI
the glorious age of our literature only because it is the
great working age of the nation—one in which all
thought was connected with actual business and was
used for the interpretation of it. In action our writers
on government and polity were formed. You would
expect to find Hooker, perhaps, cultivating his faculties
and acquiring his calm wisdom in some monistical
retreat: you find him reeking his child's cradle, shear-
ing sheep, listening to the objurgations of a very trouble-
some helpmate. Our noble Spencer will, at least, dwell
chiefly in a fantastic world : on the contrary his
fairy land is his common native earth. He could not
distinguish Liebe and Gloriana ; his supposed allegory
mixes with all daily common transactions. It was in
that battle for life and death in which every one of us
is engaged that his Sir Guyon', Artigoles, Brightcunars,
and Arthur' proved their swords and won their laurel,.