some I had seen, which, for a time at least, made themselves practically masters of the boat until the captors were glad to let them find their own way over the side. I was accordingly gratified when Jamie hove the stone from the bottom and the rattle of blocks broke the ghostly silence as we hoisted the whole lug; while when he had sculled out clear of the head it was a relief to leave the chilly darkness of that cove behind us and stretch away across the sparkling moonlit heave. A long streamer of brightness whirled up athwart it from the Ross of Kirkcudbright, and nearer at hand a dull ruby twinkle with a yellow gleam swaying above it betokened a screw coaster creeping up the bay. The wind had fallen to a gentle breeze, and we could hear her engines thumping across several miles of water. I lay along the stern sheets holding the tiller in one half-numbed hand, while with dusky canvas slanting to leeward and rising again and water filled with sea-fire tinkling merrily at her bows the boat resumed her homeward journey. Jamie discoursed of lobsters meantime, and, overlooking the law of supply and demand, complained that while during the winter, when at times one could only haul the creels in peril of his life, the crustaceans realised several shillings each, at summer prices he could only make a bare living. He would during the latter season occasionally take several dozen fine ones during a single tide. Railway and salesmen's charges were, however, exorbitant, he said, so much so that while there were plenty large oysters in the bay it hardly paid to dredge them, while now the steam trawlers had stripped the banks outside the long-shore fisher's calling was a very poor one. Neither he nor his neighbours, who disdained all shell-fish and other appetising food obtainable gratis thereabouts, would eat a conger, but he was glad that folks in manufacturing districts were singularly lacking in delicacy. "So we just pack them off to England, where they will eat anything from shrimps to a pikie dog," he concluded. "I mind we sent the salesman one we caught off the Burrow Head." The pikie dog is the dog fish, which resembles a small shark, and no doubt true sharks of inferior size not uncommon on our coast are so called at times. Along the Scottish shores they will rend the herring and mackerel meshes to seize their contents, and further south occasionally almost ruin the Cornish pilchard fisheries by tearing to pieces the drift nets they follow almost into the boats. It was now a cold though glorious night, for the bitter wind was resting to wait the flowing of the tide, and as we slid with measured lift and swing over the slow heave the fragrance of wet leaves, damp earth, and hyacinths came off from the dusky woods ashore, mingled with the invigorating saline odours of the fine sea grass. Small waders were whistling wherever there was a strip of level beach; twice, with a creak of beating pinions and a hoarse calling, a duck passed overhead; gulls were honking in the shallows, and a clumsy cormorant lumbered across our bows on shadowy wings, its trailing feet splashing in the surface of the swell. The birds of moss and shore feed equally by night and day, and care little apparently for either rest or sleep, though one may see at times when the sun is hot several gulls huddled drowsily on the top of a reeling buoy. Presently the boat, listing a little more, stretched across sandy shallows where at the time of the harvest-moon the big flounders lie, and at last her sail sank down in the shadow of a tall stone pier up steps in which we made several journeys with our loads. Jamie was contented, with some reason, for he had earned sufficient to supply a week's simple necessities during that tide, and so was I, remembering what I had seen and heard. The love of the sea is born in most islanders, and clings fast even to those who have earned their bread upon it somewhat hardly. One and all abuse it, and then often, if it happens that they need of necessity sail no more, hear the call of wind and groundswell in their leisure, and in spite of a forecastle proverb return to take their pleasure upon the waters. Still, the sea is a fickle mistress, and it was well we hauled the creels that night, for next morning the breeze had changed and freshened, and a white rush of shattered breakers hurled themselves upon battered reef and towering basalt spire. HAROLD BINDLOSS. VOL. CCXCIV. NO. 2065. G M SAID BEFORE. UCH desultory reading has convinced me that nothing can well be truer than Terence's "Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum sit prius" (see Prologue to the "Eunuchus," 1. 41), which, by-the-by, the author of The Preacher virtually forestalled when he said "There is no new thing under the sun." What provokes me to this wilful attack upon the gentle reader's patience? The sudden discovery, new to me, of the source of Dr. Johnson's celebrated reason for condemning a book without having read it through: "When I take up the end of a web and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery." (See Boswell's "Johnson," ch. 17.) Does not this look like a singularly happy adaptation of Quintilian's "Non possum togam praetextam sperare quum exordium pullum videam ?" (See his "Perfect Orator," Book 5, ch. 10.) We seem now fairly afloat, and I will humbly beg the gentle reader to take a little cruise with me, in the best of all good company, on this inviting sea, radiant with innumerable smiles. In Goethe's "Dauer im Wechsel" stands the wellknown quatrain : Gleich mit jedem Regengusse Aendert sich dein holdes Thal; Ach, und in demselben Flusse Schwimmt du nicht zum zweiten Mahl. What is this but a lawful loan from the following passage in Plato's " Cratylus "?λέγει που Ηράκλειτος ὅτι πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει· καὶ ποταμοῦ ῥοῇ ἀπεικάζων τὰ ὄντα, λέγει ὡς δὶς εἰς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης. I grieve that, writing in the depths of the country, far from all libraries but my own poor "scratch" one, I cannot verify this last quotation, taken second hand from Schopenhauer's MS. "Remains," vol. ii. p. 58, of Griesbach's edition. As Balzac says: "One triumphs as one can. 'Tis only the impotent who never triumph." An interesting passage in Sir Gilbert Blane's "Medical Logic " (p. 303, ed. of 1825) runs: "The convictions of their own sanguine minds are indeed so irresistible as to betray them into errors against the plainest evidence of their senses. Demosthenes says ô BoúλeraL, τοῦτο δ' ἕκαστος ὁρᾶται-Ι quote from memory. Or, according to the Scotch proverb, 'As the fool thinks, the bell clinks.'" For that pithy proverb's sake, we may readily forgive Sir Gilbert for quoting from memory-with the usual result. Demosthenes' words, as cited by the blameless Francis Goeller, in the notes to his world-renowned edition of Thucydides, are : ὃ γὰρ βούλεται τοῦθ ̓ ἕκαστος καὶ οἴεται ("Olynthiacs," 3, par. 33). Now, I humbly submit to the reader's judgment, may not this be the germ of King Henry IV.'s "Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought" (Henry IV. Act iv. last scene)? If it be urged, in answer to this seemingly hightreasonable suggestion, that Shakespeare knew no Greek, I should need to reply with a treatise in the style and shape of Dr. Farmer's celebrated "Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare ;" and that would -need I say?-demand a world more time and space and knowledge and ability than are at my command. But I may say, in passing, that the foregoing thought of Demosthenes appears to have been appropriated and paraphrased not only by Heliodorus, but by Chariton, whose romance, "The Loves of Chæreas and Callirhoë," gained a worldwide popularity; and there are such things as translations. Sat verbum sapienti. As I yield to no one but-as is meet-my elders and my betters in profound admiration of Shakespeare's peerless genius, I say this fearlessly, knowing that nothing can be further from my wish than to detract from his due praise, or any man's. Surely one may note these coincidences of thought without malignity-nay, even as a labour of love, showing that one has anyhow studied the works of those whom one thus sets side by side. But let us on, if on the kind reader will a little further in this, to me at least, alluring quest. That alike Ben Jonson and John Milton should have wrought, so to speak, jewels of their own from the gold lying in the self-same sentence of Sallust may seem strange, but 'tis true. Let the reader judge. In the Rev. Mr. Collette's "Relics of Literature," p. 369, I find this couplet ascribed to Ben Jonson : Although to write be lesser than to do, It is the next deed, and a great one, too. Then, in Milton's sonnet to Cromwell : Peace hath her victories I turn to Sallust's "Catiline," the beginning of chapter 3, and read : "Pulchrum est bene facere reipublicæ: etiam bene dicere haud absurdum est. Vel pace, vel bello, clarum fieri licet: et qui fecere, et qui facta aliorum scripsere multi laudantur." Is not this the mine whence, in this case, Jonson and his great contemporary drew their ore? A paper of this kind must needs be discursive and incoherent. In it one flits like a bee from flower to flower. Isaac Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" contains an Englished citation from Villegas' poems: "Thou (river) that runnest over sands of gold with feet of silver." So in Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen" one reads these lines: He dwelt beside me, near the sea; And oft at evening we did meet, When the waves beneath the starlight flee O'er the yellow sands, with silver feet. So Tennyson may seem to owe his "fairy tale of Science" to the same busy, though careless compiler-to wit, I. D., who, in his "Dreams at the Dawn of Philosophy," in the third volume of the "Curiosities," writes: "They are the fairy tales, and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, of Science." I append the well-known couplet from the first Part of "Locksley Hall: " Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime It seems to me that we may find in a couplet of Dryden's the leading thought of a certain striking passage in Macaulay's "Essay on Mme. d'Arblay's Diary and Letters." The passage runs: "It is evident that a portrait-painter able only to represent faces and figures such as those we pay money to see at fairs would not, however spirited his execution, take rank among the highest artists. He must always be placed below those who have skill to seize peculiarities that do not amount to deformity. A third-rate artist might give us the squint of Wilkes and the depressed nose and protuberant cheeks of Gibbon. It would need a far higher degree of skill to paint two such men as Mr. Canning and Sir Thomas Lawrence so that nobody who had ever seen them could for a moment hesitate to assign each picture to its original. Here the mere caricaturist would be quite at fault. He would find in neither face anything on which he could lay hold for the purpose of making a distinction. Two ample bald foreheads, two regular profiles, two full faces of the |