or damned by criticism, because his book may not have been read.  An artist may be over-rated, or undeservedly decried, because the public is not much accustomed to see or judge of pictures.  But an actor is judged by his peers, the play-going public, and must stand or fall by his own merits or defects.  The critic may give the tone or have a casting voice where popular opinion is divided; but he can no more force that opinion either way, or wrest it from its base in common-sense and feeling, than he can move Stonehenge.  Mr. Kean had, however, physical disadvantages and strong prejudices to encounter, and so far the liberal and independent part of the press might have been of service in helping him to his seat in the public favour.

* * * * *

THE GATHERER.

  “I am but a Gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuff.”—­Wotton.

* * * * *

INSANITY.

A French physician, in a recent work on the moral and physical causes of insanity, noticing the influence of professions in promoting this affliction, brings forward a curious table, showing the relative proportion of different professions in a mass of 164 lunatics.  It runs thus:—­merchants, 50; military men, 33; students, 25; administrateurs et employes, 21; advocates, notaries, and men of business, 10; artists, 8; chemists, 4; medical practitioners, 4; farmers, 4; sailors, 3; engineers, 2.  Total 164.

Never were the afflictions of Insanity more vividly portrayed than in the following lines from Churchill’s Epistle to Hogarth:—­

  Sure ’tis a curse which angry fates impose,
  To mortify man’s arrogance, that those
  Who’re fashioned of some better sort of clay,
  Must sooner than the common herd decay. 
  What bitter pangs must humble genius feel,
  In their last hour to view a Swift and Steele! 
  How must ill-boding horrors fill their breast,
  When she beholds men, mark’d above the rest
  For qualities most dear, plung’d from that height,
  And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood’s night! 
  Are men indeed such things? and are the best
  More subject to this evil than the rest,
  To drivel out whole years of idiot breath,
  And sit the monuments of living death? 
  O galling circumstance to human pride! 
  Abasing thought! but not to be deny’d. 
  With curious art, the brain too finely wrought,
  Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought. 
  Constant attention wears the active mind,
  Blots out her pow’rs and leaves a blank behind.

* * * * *

MACADAMIZATION.

  The cost of converting Regent-street,
  Whitehall-place, and Palace-yard, into
  broken stone roads, has been L 6,055 8_s_. 3_d_.