as applied to the
hurry, the uproar, the strife, the agony of life as it boils along some
of the main arteries among the London streets. About the hour of
equinoctial sunset comes a periodic respite in the shape of dinner. Were
it not for that, were it not for the wine and the lustre of lights, and
the gentle restraints of courtesies, and the soothing of conversation,
through which a daily reaction is obtained, London would perish from
excitement in a year. The effect upon one who like ourselves simply
beholds the vast frenzy attests its power. The mere sympathy, into which
the nerves are forced by the eye, expounds the fury with which it must
act upon those who are acting and suffering participators in the mania.
Rome suffered in the same way, but in a less degree: and the same relief
was wooed daily in a brilliant dinner (_caena_), but two and a half hours
earlier.

The same state of things exists proportionately in other
capitals--Edinburgh, Dublin, Naples, Vienna. And doubtless, if the
curtain were raised, the same penalties would be traced as pursuing this
agitated life; the penalties, we mean, that exist in varied shapes of
nervous disease.

2.--OMITTED PASSAGES FROM THE REVIEW OF BENNETT'S CEYLON.

Mr. Bennett personally is that good man who interests us the more
because he seems to be an ill-used one. By the way, here is a
combination which escaped the Roman moralist: _Vir bonus_, says he,
_mala fortuna compositus_, is a spectacle for the gods. Yet what is that
case, the case of a man matched in duel with the enmity of a malicious
fellow-creature--naturally his inferior, but officially having means to
oppress him? No man is naturally or easily roused to anger by a blind
abstraction like Fortune; and therefore he is under no temptation to
lose his self-command. He sustains no trial that can make him worthy of
a divine contemplation. Amongst all the extravagancies of human nature,
never yet did we hear of a person who harboured a sentiment of private
malice against Time for moving too rapidly, or against Space for being
infinitely divisible. Even animated annoyers, if they are without spite
towards ourselves, we regard with no enmity. No man in all history, if
we except the twelfth Caesar, has nourished a deadly feud against
flies[54]: and if Mrs. Jameson allowed a sentiment of revenge to nestle
in her heart towards the Canadian mosquitoes, it was the race and not
the individual parties to the trespass on he