Cardinal Richelieu. Mademoiselle de Gournay,
then in extreme old age, still survived him.
When the list of pensions granted by the
Cardinal was submitted to the King, her
name caught his eye. Louis the Thirteenth—
who might have had some grateful recollection
of the many hearty laughs his Royalty had
enjoyed at her expense—declared that the
Cardinal must have been mad to grant such
a woman a pension, and ordered it to be
suppressed! Mademoiselle de Gournay passed
the few remaining years of her life in a state
of poverty painful to reflect upon. She died
somewhere about 1646, at the age of eighty.

Poor as she was, she made her will, as
became a person of her birth. She bequeathed
her clothes to Mademoiselle Jamyn, who, old
and infirm, survived her; a few books she
left to different friends; and a curious old
Map of the World, to the poet Gombauld—
a personage as eccentric as herself, and one
who lived and died in still greater penury,
but who valued her legacy, and transmitted
it to his heirs as the most precious treasure
in the world.

STRINGS OF PROVERBS.

"A miss is as good as a mile." The chance
of good or ill is just the same, if it does not
touch you, whether it be far off or close at
hand. To throw the number next to the
prize is no better than to be at the bottom of
the list. Yet there are exceptions. The
captain of a vessel of war in a South American
patriot service, was standing on the mole-
head of Vera Cruz one morning, in company
with several junior officers. They were
espied, across the bay, by some artillerymen
on the batteries of St. Juan Ulloa, and a shot
from a forty-eight pounder was sent at them,
which so nearly struck the spot that the whole
party were splashed with the water. "A
miss is as good as a mile! " shouted the
captain, laughing. But it was more than as
good as a mile; for the artillery officer on
the batteries correcting his aim by his miss,
sent a second shot, which knocked the captain
into the sea.

"God helps those who help themselves. '' This
is from the French—"Aide toi,et le ciel t'aidera."
La Fontaine derived it from Æsop. It is
illustrated by a waggoner whose waggon
having stuck in a slough, he began to call
aloud upon Jupiter—" Goad your oxen, set
your shoulder to the wheel, and Heaven will
help you! " A counsel of thorough practical
wisdom. There is another saying founded
upon this, but it takes the form of a
profoundly bitter satire—"Help yourself, and
your friends will love you." When you need
no assistance, they will give you that which
costs them nothing—their love; in doing
which they may also serve their own interests,
by sharing in your successful perseverance.
But there is another point of view from which
this latter saying may be looked at. Friends
who are wealthy, or have great influence, do
not always feel their love increased by your
having succeeded well without their help.
Their self-love has lost the opportunity of
"patronising."

"What can ye expect frae an oolie-pig " (oilcan)
"but oolie?" A more quaint and graceful
version of our " What can you expect from a
hog but a grunt? " though the latter is turned
into a more angry personal satire. It is curious
and laughable to trace how, by a blunder in
the meaning of " oolie-pig," our own proverb
has been derived.

"Fine verses are precious as the relics of a
Saint." (Chinese.) And the people consider
them so, in most countries; but only when
they have become relics.

"In truth, it is not man that creates obstacles,
but Heaven: and how can we help it?"
(Chinese.) We think the truth lies directly
on the contrary. The saying is characteristic
of an enslaved people, or people of little
energy.

"Virtue is its own reward." This comes
originally from the Chinese, with whom it
stands thus: " Virtue is, at last, its own
reward."

"Fine feathers make fine birds." The
Chinese have a wiser saying,—" Rich clothes
cannot conceal a clown.''

"A child may take a horse to water, but ten
men cannot make him drink." It is often easy
to make first beginnings, in cases where there
is the greatest difficulty in accomplishing a
thing. This is a very forcible (though, of
course, quite unintentional) comment in
opposition to the French saying of " Ce n'est que le
premier pas qui coûte"—the first step is the
great difficulty. Yet, though one directly
contradicts the experience of the other, both
are equally derived from sound experience.
"Truth," says Hazlitt, " is not one-sided, but
many-sided; and an observation may contradict
another, made by the same person, without
any inconsistency, according to the point
of view from which it is looked at."

"L'aigle d'une maison est un sot dans un
autre;" the eagle of one house is the goose
of another. Admiration dwells in different
circles, which either scoff at the idols of each
other, or ignore them. Of a similar tendency
is the proverb of " One man's meat is another
man's poison." Since any special thing, if
desired by everybody, would soon be
exhausted, how fortunate it is that "tastes
differ;" and how amusing it is to see how
each one, being quite satisfied with his own,
treats the rest with contempt, as expressed in
the additional epithet of " Chacun à son
mauvais goût "—every one to his bad taste.

"In for a penny, in for a pound:" a proverb
which not only expresses the recklessness,
or, at least, the touch of desperation,
that often follows on taking the first step in
an imprudence, but is also quoted continually
as a sort of excuse and encouragement—a
thing that must be. Of the same class is the