He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and “Peep at the Pilgrims,” and “Saratoga,” with praise, and named with accuracy the characters in them.  He likes to have a person always reading to him, or company talking in his room, and is better the next day after having visitors in his chamber from morning to night.

He received a premature report of his son’s election, on Sunday afternoon, without any excitement, and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was not yet time for any news to arrive.  The informer, something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing to the meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the congregation, who were so overjoyed that they rose in their seats and cheered thrice.  The Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—­muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these.  But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.  I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.  I have heard, that, whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution.  The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side.  But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—­at the end of life just ready to be born,—­affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Lectures on the Science of Languages, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861.  By MAX MUeLLER, M.A., Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford; Corresponding Member of the Imperial Institute of France.  London:  Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts. 1861. 8vo. pp. xii., 399.

The name of Mr. Max Mueller is familiar to American students as that of a man who, learned in the high German fashion, has the pleasant faculty, unhappily too rare among Germans, of communicating his erudition in a way not only comprehensible, but agreeable to the laity.  The Teutonic Gelehrte, gallantly devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling hedge of abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated citations that take panglottism for granted as an ordinary incident of human culture, too hastily assumes a tenacity of life on the part of his reader as great as his own.  All but those with whom the study of language is a specialty pass him by as Dante does Nimrod, gladly concluding

  “Che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio,
  Come il suo ad altrui, che a nullo e noto.”