in the passage, stole up stairs, and listened
anxiously outside Magdalen's door. A dull
sound of sobbing—a sound stifled in her hand-
kerchief, or stifled in the bed-clothes—was all
that caught his ear. He returned at once to
the ground floor, with some faint suspicion of the
truth dawning on his mind at last.

"The devil take that sweetheart of hers!"
thought the captain." Mr. Noel Vanstone has
raised the ghost of him at starting."

PERVERTED INGENUITY

TIRED out with the search after ideas, with
the uncertainty and incompleteness of all human
science—weary of great speculations that end
in doubt, of unrewarded efforts, of misinterpreted
opinions, of wisdom that brings no heart's ease,
and knowledge that only enlarges the self-
cognisance of pain—the intellectual men of all
ages have, in that mood of playfulness which
sometimes partakes of the sadness of
disappointment, no less than of the brightness of
fancy, employed their leisure moments in the
composition of laborious trifles, such as mock
the fruits of their graver studies with
something of a fairy quaintness. Hence the flood
of anagrams, acrostics, palindromes, alliterative
verses, shaped verses, echo verses, macaronics,
bouts rimes, &c., poured forth over the broad
lands of literature, not by mere flippant idlers,
or dull men mistaking themselves for wits, but
often by authors of real scholarship and ability.
It is true that Addison, in his papers on False
Wit, published in successive numbers of the
Spectator, says that it would be impossible to
decide whether the inventor of the acrostic or
the anagram were the greater blockhead. But,
with all due respect to the exquisite essayist of
the days of Anne—to the immortal creator of
Sir Roger de Coverley—there was a little
affectation of extreme classical propriety about the
period to which Addison belonged, which
sometimes cramped even his genial mind, and
certainly rendered him incapable of doing justice to
the wild freakishness of these literary games.
Men of larger powers than Addison have not
disdained to stoop to this level. Friar Bacon,
Huyghens, Galileo, and even Sir Isaac Newton,
communicated several of their discoveries to
the world by means of anagrams; and Camden
wrote an essay on the subject (to be found in
his Remains), in which he calls the objectors to
such toys, persons of "the sowre sort." In
fact, it is as great a mistake to under-rate as to
over-rate them; and, considering the
extraordinary degree of ingenuity, patience, and wit,
often exhibited in their construction, they are
deserving of more regard than they have recently
obtained.

A curious collection of anagrams and other
cognate oddities has just been put forth by Mr.
H. B. Wheatley, who, in a little volume,
produced in the manner dear to antiquarians—with
gilt edges at the top, and plain edges at the
bottom and side: with toned paper, old-fashioned
type, and fantastic ornaments—has brought
together a large amount of rare information on
the topics which he undertakes to handle. We
cannot spend half an hour more agreeably than
by glancing through Mr. Wlieatley's pages,
occasionally supplementing his knowledge by the
fruits of our own casual reading.

Chronograms are sentences so formed that
they shall include the letters necessary to signify
in Roman numerals some date relating to the
person or circumstance commemorated. These
are generally in Latin, and the numeral letters
are distinguished by being placed in capitals. A
chronogrammatical Latin poem is in existence,
containing a hundred hexameters, every one of
which contains the date 1634. Like its twin
brother, the anagram, the chronogram lias been
used as a vehicle of mysticism by the fanatical.
Michael Stifelius, a Lutheran minister at
Würtemberg, deduced in this way from a passage in
John, xix. 37, a prophecy that the world would
come to an end in 1533. The passage ("They
shall look on him whom they pierced") stands
thus in Latin, which we give in the
chronogrammatical form adopted by Michael:
"VIDebVnt In qVeM transflXerVnt;" from which
the reader may pick out the date MDXVVVVIII
(1533). The prophet even went so far as to
state the month, the day of the month, and the
hour, at which the vaticination was to be
fulfilled; but for these he does not seem to have
had even a fanciful warrant. On the morning
when the chronogram was to come true,
Stifelius was preaching to his congregation, when a
violent storm arose, and the people began to
think that their pastor was verily an inspired
man. Suddenly, however, the clouds dispersed,
to the confusion of chronogrammatical prophecy,
and to the great indignation of the worshippers,
who disappointed of the wonder they had been
led to expect, set upon the preacher, and beat
him severely for not knowing better. The frame
of mind of the worshippers at the coming on of
the storm must have been equivalent to that of
the Irish hodman, who had made a bet that his
comrade could not carry him up a ladder to the
top of a high house without letting him fall, and
who, feeling the other's foot slip about the third
story, "began to have hopes." Their exasperation
at the non-fulfilment of the prophecy will
probably be understood by those modern
believers in similar forecastings who have been so
frequently disappointed of late that one of them
has been heard to declare he shall "give it up"
if something does not happen next year.

Palindromes are words or sentences that may
be read the same backwards and forwards, letter
by letter; such as this motto, once made by a
lawyer for himself: "Si nummi immunis"—
translated by Camden, "Give me my fee, and I
warrant you free," in which the sense is
preserved, and the mechanical ingenuity lost. Such,
also, is the sentence in which Adam has been
supposed by some profane wit to have introduced
himself to Eve: "Madam, I'm Adam." In
Lyon verses (apparently so called after the city
of Lyons, where they originated), the sentence
is read backwards word by word, instead of letter