ht to Englishmen.

3.--GILLMAN'S COLERIDGE.

Variation on the opening of 'Coleridge and Opium-eating.'

What is the deadest thing known to philosophers? According to popular
belief, it is a door-nail. For the world says, 'Dead as a door-nail!'
But the world is wrong. Dead may be a door-nail; but deader and most
dead is Gillman's Coleridge. Which fact in Natural History we
demonstrate thus: Up to Waterloo it was the faith of every child that a
sloth took a century for walking across a street. His mother, if she
'knew he was out,' must have had a pretty long spell of uneasiness
before she saw him back again. But Mr. Waterton, Baptist of a new
generation in these mysteries, took that conceit out of Europe: the
sloth, says he, cannot like a snipe or a plover run a race neck and neck
with a first-class railway carriage; but is he, therefore, a slow coach?
By no means: he would go from London to Edinburgh between seedtime and
harvest. Now Gillman's Coleridge, vol. i., has no such speed: it has
taken six years to come up with those whom chiefly it concerned. Some
dozen of us, Blackwood-men and others, are stung furiously in that book
during the early part of 1838; and yet none of us had ever perceived the
nuisance or was aware of the hornet until the wheat-fields of 1844 were
white for the sickle. In August of 1844 we saw Gillman.

4.--WHY SCRIPTURE DOES NOT DEAL WITH SCIENCE ('PAGAN ORACLES').

The Fathers grant to the Oracles a real power of foresight and prophecy,
but in all cases explain these supernatural functions out of diabolic
inspiration. Van Dale, on the other hand, with all his Vandalish
followers, treats this hypothesis, both as regards the power itself of
looking into the future and as regards the supposed source of that
power, in the light of a contemptible chimera. They discuss it scarcely
with gravity: indeed, the very frontispiece to Van Dale's book already
announces the repulsive spirit of scoffing and mockery in which he means
to dismiss it; men are there represented in the act of juggling and
coarsely exulting over their juggleries by protruding the tongue or
exchanging collusive winks with accomplices. Now, in a grave question
obliquely affecting Christianity and the course of civilization, this
temper of discussion is not becoming, were the result even more
absolutely convincing than it is. Everybody can see at a glance that it
is not this particular agency of evil spirits which Van Dale would ha