From The Saturday Review.
LIMP PEOPLE.

THE traitors of life are the limp, much more than the wicked-people who let things be wormed out of them rather than intentionally betray them. They repent likely enough: Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their repentance when the mischief is done? Not all the tears in the world can put out the fire when once lighted, and to hang oneself because one has betrayed another will make no difference save in the number of victims which one's own weakness has created.

tenth. Lend them continually all the money you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness of any future day of reckoning, but refrain once for your own imperative needs, and they will leave your house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be grateful implies some kind of retentive faculty, and this is just what the limp have not got. Another characteristic of a different kind is the rashness with which they throw themselves into circumstances which they afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know how to calculate their forces, and spend the latter half of their life in regretting what they had spent the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to get rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they wish they had taken B. instead; as house-mistresses they turn away their servants at short notice after long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by any means they can bribe them to stay. They know nothing of that clear incisive action which sets men and women at ease with themselves, and enables them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with dignity and resignation. A limp backboneless creature always falls foul of conditions, whatever they may be, thinking the right side better than the left, and the left one so much nicer than the right, according to its own place of standing for the moment; and what heads plan and hands execute, lips are never weary of bemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies, do not know what they want, being unconscious that the whole mischief lies in their having a vertebral column of gristle instead of one of bone. Then they spread themselves abroad, and take the world into their confidence, weep in public and rave in private, and cry aloud to the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side (may be heavily laden for their own share) to come over and help them, poor sprawling mollusks, when no man but themselves can set them upright. The confidences of the limp are told through a trumpet to all four corners of the sky, and

Limp men are invariably under petticoat government, and it all depends on chance and the run of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The mother's for a long period; then the sisters'. If the wife's, there is sure to be war in the feminine camp belonging to the invertebrate commander; for such a man creates infinitely more jeal ousy among his womankind than the most discursive and the most unjust. He is a power, not to act, but to be used; and the woman who can hold him with the firmest grasp has necessarily the largest share of good things belonging. She can close or draw his purse-strings at pleasure; she can use his name, and mask herself behind his authority at pleasure; he is the undying Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him well up in front; and we can scarcely wonder that the various female Spenlows who shoot with his bow and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each other to a frantic pitch, regarding his limpness, as they do, as so much raw material from which they can spin out their own strength. As the mollusk has to become the prey of some one, the question simply resolves itself into Whose? the new wife's or the old sisters'? Who shall govern, sitting on his shoulders? and to whom shall he be assigned captive? He generally inclines to his wife, if she is younger than he, and has backbone of her own; and you may see a limp man of this kind, with a fringe of old-are as easy to get at, with the very gentlest rooted female epiphytes, gradually drop one after another of the ancient stock, till at last his wife and her relations take up all the space, and are the only ones he supports. His own kith and kin go bare, while he clothes her and hers in purple and fine linen; and the fatted calves in his stalls are liberally slain for the prodigals on her side of the house, while the dutiful sons on his own get nothing better than the husks.

Another characteristic of limp people is their curious ingratitude. Give them ninetenths of your substance, and they will turn against you if you refuse them the remaining

pressure, as the juice of an over-ripe grape. And no lessons of experience will ever teach them reticence, or caution in their choice of confidants. Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for which contending parties fight, perpetually oscil

lating between the maintenance of old abuses | visits of the stranger within his gates and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; will, in spite of me, invade my leisure. If but the side to which they have pledged his pursuits are like my own, he jars on me themselves on Monday they forsake on with a rivalry; if his road in life lies quite Tuesday under the plea of reconversion. apart, he revolts me by outraging my symNeither can they carry out any design of pathies; if he deals with my tradesfolk, I their own, if their friends take it in hand to suspect him of being better treated than I over-persuade them. If a man of this stamp am, that he gets honester measure in his has painted a picture he can be induced to coals, and more cream in his milk; if his change the whole key, the central circum- acquaintance runs in an humbler current stance, and the principal figure, at the sug- than my own, I inveigh against the vulgar gestion of a confident critic who is only a contact of his associates; if they who frepupil in the art of which he is, at least tech- quent him are of an order superior to my nically, a master; if he is preaching or lec- own friends, my dislike is heightened by a turing, he thinks more of the people he is sense of envy. Now, had he only lived in addressing than of what he has to say, and, the next street instead of next door, I had though impelled at times to use the scalp-known none of these things, and his new ing-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehe- liveries had never cost me a pang, nor had ment advocates at times, these men's enthu- that splendid haunch of vension I saw carsiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself ried in but yesterday disgusted me with my out by its own energy of expression; and own tough mutton at dinner. how fierce soever their aspect when they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries to which none as yet hold the key.

From Blackwood's Magazine.
THE DIFFICULT PRECEPT.

Or all the Christian virtues we are enjoined to cultivate, I know of no one so difficult as to love one's neighbour."

It is not to the amount of the affection I would take exception, though I am aware that in the height of the standard lies a great difficulty, and that there must be few men comparatively in the world who could transfer the stock of their self-love to the account of their neighbour. The really great difficulty of the precept is in the fact that he is your neighbour.

Why is it, and to what is it owing, that we have a natural antipathy to a Frenchman? I will not stop to dispute the proposition, which I sincerely trust no thorough Englishman will contest; but ask simply, for what other reason do we dislike him but that he is our neighbour? The man who lives next door to me must be hateful to me. I see too much and I know too little of him not to detest him. His hours of going out and coming home-his calls of business or pleasure the errands of his man-servant and his maid-servant, and the

It is in the points of contact that are never touches of cohesiveness, lies all the antipathy. That we are ready to forgive Russians, Germans, and Italians, scores of things we cannot put up with in the Frenchman, none will deny. It comes to this, that the man next door is positively odious from the number of times every day some feature of his life will obtrude itself on our own, and seem, out of sheer impertinence, to insist on occupying a share in our attention. The very people who ring at our bell in mistake for his are an offence; and our identity that dear thing we cling to through all our mishaps in the world is outraged at being confounded and mistaken for another's. And as for the little compliments and courtesies of life that, intended for him, have by an accident been left at our door, they are the dregs of all bitterness in our cup of disappointment. How came it ever to my imagination to ponder over the insignificance of my lot if it were not for that card from Buckingham Palace which a blundering messenger had dropped with me instead of next door?

That inveterate dislike that exists between

Whigs and Tories is solely felt because they live in the same street, and are next door to each other; while neither has the same antipathy to the Radical, who dwells in the

stable-lane round the corner "-a vulgar dog if you like, but not a bad sort of fellow at bottom; and this is the judgment solely founded on the fact that his ways and doings are not in hourly contact with our own.

The rancour of party hatred never reached its climax till we saw the two rival factions contending to carry the same measures that is, till they came to live side by side.

In the old days of opposite views and objects they fought their battles boldly, bravely, manfully, but there was no acrimony, for their houses were not next door. It was only in our own day that it occurred to them to become neighbours, and we see what has come of it.

So long as each hunted his own line of country, one might say that his neighbour's dogs were slow to find, and ran wildly; or the other might retort, that his pack were mostly mongrels, and never gave voice together. Still each could follow his sport without interruption, and on the whole no very serious bad feeling came of it. But now that they are driven to draw the same cover, and have only one fox between them, there's nothing too bad for each to say of the other. Mr. Disraeli declares the fox was his fox, and that if he had not hunted him before, it was because he was employed teaching some friends to ride" educating them," he called it, to take fences and ditches they weren't used to. Mr. Gladstone denied this; that the fox had strayed out of his cover; and that he felt the unsportsmanlike conduct of his neighbour so acutely, that he would rather dispose of his pack and give up hunting for the season. Nothing of this would have happened had each kept to his own county. All the bad feeling came of propinquity; for, be it remarked, neither of them was displeased when the Radicals came out and took a run with them.

at my knocker? whose telegrams startle me from my sleep? whose whole life is it that will run Rhone-like through the placid Geneva-Lake of my existence, and by its strong current mar the grand tranquillity of my days? My neighbour's.

When I read of the projects for bridging over the strip of sea between Dover and Calais, or the plans for tunnelling a road beneath the waters; when I hear the speculations of those who believe that, by what they call " drawing closer to France," we shall cultivate more surely the relations of friendship, and more effectually combat the mistrusts and prejudices that beset the relations between strange peoples, when, I say, I see and hear these things, I ask myself, Where have they lived who enunciate these doctrines? What experiences have they had of life? What lesson has the world taught them, if it be not this, - That where there is no common bond of interest to bind men, no unity of pursuit or object, there is no more sure promoter of bickering, bad feeling, and dislike, than too close proximity.

I have occasional twinges of gout; lobster mayonnaise, with cucumber, washed down with iced Mosel-cup, does not agree with me as well as it used to do; nor are my morning recollections of anchovy sandwiches and " bishops as free from repinings as once they were. "Tempora mutantur," and digestive organs "cum illis; " and there do come moments when life is They tell us that the law of primogeni- crape-covered, and when in my discontent ture makes a man little affectionate to his with the world I include myself, and have eldest son, but full of love for his grand- to own that there is not a grievance nor an child; and here it is, once more, the next- ill that assails me for which I am not perdoor neighbour there is no forgiving, and sonally responsible, and that for every hard even he a little farther off is preferable to turn of fortune I have been an aider and him! As for that old adage of the Romans, abettor. At such moments as these - and that declares" loving the same and hating of late years they have a habit of coming the same 99 constitutes true friendship, I oftener than I care for, at such moments take it there never was a greater fallacy. as these when I am soured with lifeReal sympathy is the sense of enjoyment when I see, or think that I see, Fortune has I feel when I see my friend delighted by dealt me all the small cards of the pack, something I don't care for. If any one dis- and never a trump-when I feel myself putes my definition, let him think how in- walking the world's stage without a part in convenient the converse would prove in our the comedy - scarcely a supernumerarycourts of divorce, and that even the most rather a creature that has strayed in from gushing heart is not bound to like a Co-"the flats," and like enough to be hooted respondent. off if discovered, at such periods of existence as these, I do believe I like my neighbour pretty much like myself, and I wish him joy of the affection.

Whose dog keeps me awake all night? whose daughters' duets drive me distracted half, the day? whose duns come thundering

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MRS. WARD's picture for the next Academy fant King of Rome, which took place in the Exhibition represents one of those pathetic in- presence of her divorced husband: this one octerviews of the Empress Josephine with the in-curred at La Bagatelle.

From Nature.
THE VELOCITY OF THOUGHT.

"As quick as thought" is a common proverb, and probably not a few persons feel inclined to regard the speed of mental operations as beyond our powers of measurement. Apart, however, from these minds which take their owners so long in making up because they are so great, rough experience clearly shows that ordinary thinking does take time; and as soon as mental processes were brought to work in connection with delicate instruments and exact calculations, it became obvious that the time they consumed was a matter for serious consideration. A well-known instance of this is the "personal equation" of the astronomers. When a person watching the movement of a star, makes a signal the instant he sees it, or the instant it seems to him to cross a certain line, it is found that a definite fraction of a second always elapses between the actual falling of the image of the star on the observer's eye, and the making of the signala fraction, moreover, varying somewhat with different observers, and with the same observer under differing mental conditions. Of late years considerable progress has been made towards an accurate knowledge of this mental time.

A typical bodily action, involving mental effort, may be regarded as made up of three terms; of sensations travelling towards the brain, of processes thereby set up within the brain, and of resultant motor impulses travelling from the brain towards the muscles which are about to be used. Our first task is to ascertain how much time is consumed in each of these terms; we may afterwards try to measure the velocity of the various stages and parts into which each term may be further subdivided.

The velocity of motor impulses is by far the simplest case of the three, and has already been made out pretty satisfactorily. We can assert, for instance, that in frogs a motor impulse, the message of the will to the muscle, travels at about the rate of 28 metres a second, while in man it moves at about 33 metres. The method by which this result is obtained may be described in its simplest form somewhat as follows:

The muscle which in the frog corresponds to the calf of the leg, may be prepared with about two inches of its proper nerve still attached to it. If a galvanic current be brought to bear on the nerve close to the muscle, a motor impulse is set up in the nerve, and a contraction of the muscle follows. Between the exact moment when the current breaks into the nerve, and the exact moment when the muscle begins to con- I

tract, a certain time elapses. This time is measured in this way:- A blackened glass cylinder, made to revolve very rapidly, is fitted with two delicate levers, the points of wihich just touch the blackened surface at some little distance apart from each other. So long as the levers remain perfectly motionless, they trace on the revolving cylinder two parallel, horizontal, unbroken lines; and any movement of either is indicated at once by an upward (or downward) deviation from the horizontal line. These levers further are so arranged (as may readily be done) that the one lever is moved by the entrance of the very galvanic current which gives rise to the motor impulse in the nerve, and thus marks the beginning of that motor impulse; while the other is moved by the muscle directly this begins to contract, and thus marks the beginning of the muscular contraction. Taking note of the direction in which the cylinder is revolving, it is found that the mark of the setting-up of the motor impulse is always some little distance ahead of the mark of the muscular contraction; it only remains to be ascertained to what interval of time that distance of space on the cylinder corresponds. Did we know the actual rate at which the cylinder reIvolves this might be calculated, but an easier method is to bring a vibrating tuningfork, of known pitch, to bear very lightly sideways on the cylinder, above or between the two levers. As the cylinder revolves, and the tuning-fork vibrates, the latter will mark on the former a horizontal line, made up of minute, uniform waves corresponding to the vibrations. In any given distance, as for instance in the distance between the two marks made by the levers, we may count the number of waves. These will give us the number of vibrations made by the tuning-fork in the interval; and knowing how many vibrations the tuning-fork makes in a second, we can easily tell to what fraction of a second the number of vibrations counted corresponds. Thus, if the tuning-fork vibrates 100 times a second, and in the interval between the marks of the two levers we count ten waves, we can tell that the time between the two marks, i.e. the time between the setting-up of the motor impulse and the beginning of the muscular contraction, was .1 of a second.

Having ascertained this, the next step is to repeat the experiment exactly in the same way, except that the galvanic current is brought to bear upon the nerve, not close to the muscle, but as far off as possible at the furthest point of the two inches of nerve. The motor impulse has then to travel along the two inches of nerve before

The contraction of a muscle offers us an excellent objective sign of the motor impulse having arrived at its destination; and, all muscles behaving pretty much the same towards their exciting motor impulses, the Then, again, the mental actions involved results obtained by different observers show in the making the signal may take place a remarkable agreement. With regard to more readily in connection with sensations the velocity of sensations or sensory im- from certain parts of the body than from pulses, the case is very different; here we others. In fact, there are so many varihave no objective sign of the sensation hav-ables in the data for calculation that though ing reached the brain, and are consequently the observations hitherto made seem to driven to roundabout methods of research. We may attack the problem in this way.