If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.

Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.