Aw nivir can call hur my Wife... Here she goes-and there she goes The Dressmaker's Thrush....... The Baroness Nairn........ 164 The Maid with the Milking-pail Jean Ingelow....... Mrs. Caudle's Umbrella Lecture Body of Cæsar Claude Melnotte's Description of the Lake of Como Tact v. Talent.. Amy's Secret................... PENNY READINGS. MAN'S USE AND FUNCTION. JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. THAT is, to everything created pre-eminently useful which enables us rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it, by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself. Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this, follow me no further; for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness. Pre Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the pure and first sense of the word useful to us. eminently, therefore, whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are in a secondary and mean sense useful; or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are useless and worse; for it would be better that we should not exist than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence. And yet people speak in this working-age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment, were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless; so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables. Men who think, as far as such |