kept in ignorance more of himself and men, for he hears naught but flattery; and what is fit to be spoken, truth with so much. preface that it loses itself. Thus he lives till his tomb be made ready, and is then a grave statue to posterity. Complete. Number LXXV. of "Microcosmography." AN ON AN ORDINARY HONEST FELLOW N ORDINARY honest fellow is one whom it concerns to be called honest, for if he were not this, he were nothing: and yet he is not this neither, but a good, dull, vicious fellow, that complies well with the deboshments of the time, and is fit for it. One that has no good part in him to offend his company, or make him to be suspected a proud fellow, but is sociably a dunce, and sociably a drinker. That does it fair and above board without legerdemain, and neither sharks for a cup or a reckoning; that is kind over his beer, and protests he loves you, and begins to you again, and loves you again. One that quarrels with no man, but for not pledging him, but takes all absurdities and commits as many, and is no telltale next morning, though he remember it. One that will fight for his friend if he hear him abused, and his friend commonly is he that is most likely, and he lifts up many a jug in his defense. He rails against none but censurers, against whom he thinks he rails lawfully, and censures all those that are better than himself. These good properties qualify him for honesty enough, and raise him high in the alehouse commendation, who, if he had any other good quality, would be named by that. But now for refuge he is an honest man, and hereafter a sot; only those that commend him think him not so, and those that commend him are honest fellows. Complete. Number LXXVII. of "Microcosmography." M MARIA EDGEWORTH (1767-1849) ISS EDGEWORTH's essay on "Irish Bulls" is really a collection of essays and sketches, the joint work of Miss Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. In writing his biography, she says that though she does not clearly remember which parts are entirely her own, those which contain classical allusions must be his, as she was "entirely ignorant of the learned languages." This seems to transfer to her father the celebrated sketch of the quarrel between Dublin shoeblacks, which Saintsbury attributes to her. It is well enough she should be relieved of it, for there is something unfeminine and uncharacteristic of her in the classical jesting on the use of the shoe knife in a street quarrel. Taking the essay on "Irish Bulls" as a whole, it had a narrow escape from the greatness as an essay, which Miss Edgeworth achieved as a novelist. She was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1767, but she belongs of right to Ireland, where she went when only twelve years old. "The Absentee," one of the many powerful novels in which she rallied the forces of fiction to the aid of good morals, is a plea for justice for the Irish peasantry against nonresident landlords. She died in 1849, after having written eighteen volumes of the best fiction of modern times. Nearly always she is a good artist as well as a good woman and a good preacher; and if sometimes she stops the story too long in the interest of the sermon, it ought to be forgiven her for the sake of her entire unlikeness to the Sapphos of "end-of-the-century >> fiction. THE THE ORIGINALITY OF IRISH BULLS EXAMINED HE difficulty of selecting from the vulgar herd of Irish bulls one that shall be entitled to the prize, from the united merits of pre-eminent absurdity and indisputable originality, is greater than hasty judges may imagine. Many bulls, reputed to be bred and born in Ireland, are of foreign extraction; and many more, supposed to be unrivaled in their kind, may be matched in all their capital points: for instance, there is not a |