Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,--teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world's good.

So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'

Cecil's dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, "The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once."

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago.

Whatever is done for men takes away from the stimulus and necessity of doing things for themselves. The value of legislative as an agent in human advancement has been much over-estimated. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober.

The reason why so little is done, is generally because so little is attempted.

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.