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pression in the form of a beautiful silver vase presented to him by his fellow-citizens, the inscription on which records that it is a memorial of respect and gratitude for his fearless and humane devotion to the duties of Christian philanthropy during the visitation of an appalling pestilence.

political pamphleteer, or newspaper assailant of his cherished schemes-were laid prostrate by sickness, Dr. Strachan was among the foremost with proffered sympathy, or, if need were, substantial aid. With open heart and liberal hand he dispensed the charities of a generous nature; and in the hour of convalescence would cheer his old antagonist with bantering challenge to renewed warfare. It is pleasant so to think of him welcome wherever he visited, in joy or sorrow, and everywhere a special favourite with the young. His kindly greet-hand of time had been laid gently on him;

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ing was shared even by the household dog; and in his own later years, not the least characteristic feature of the bishop's library was his huge tom-cat comfortably coiled on the well-cushioned easy chair. Or again, in equally pleasant contrast to such homely scenes, we recall him on his long and toilsome missionary tours and episcopal visitations, undaunted by cold, hunger, fatigue, or privation; as genial and kindly among the poor settlers in their frontier log-cabin, as in the best society that Toronto could supply; and even in old age shaming the youngest of his clergy by the cheerfulness with which he bore the inevitable fastings and privations of their journeys into the wilds of Canada. Again, his fearless labours attract attention under another aspect. When during the terrible outbreak of cholera in 1832, it was computed that a fourth of the whole population of Toronto were attacked, and upwards of a twelfth died of the malignant disease. While hundreds were fleeing from the plague-stricken city, Dr. Strachan devoted himself to tending on the sick and dying with such self-sacrificing zeal, that the admiration excited by his conduct found ex

As his long and busy life drew towards its end, many of the earlier causes of strife and contention had been removed; and it seemed as if the calm of a beautiful autumnal evening gathered around life's close. The

yet as he approached his ninetieth year it was impossible that he should not feel the pres sure of many exacting official duties. In 1866, accordingly, his old pupil and friend, Dr. A. N. Bethune, Archdeacon of Toronto, was elected his coadjutor in the episcopate, and he felt himself free to spend the few remaining months of life in kindly, genial intercourse with old friends, and with some also who had been old opponents. When at length, on the 1st of November, 1867, he expired at the venerable age of ninety, men of all creeds in religion and in politics united to do honour to his memory. His integrity of purpose was universally acknowledged : his liberal charities, so unostentatiously distributed, were recalled with grateful recognition; and many were ready to own that they owed to his generosity the assistance which had been rendered to them in the hour of adversity, or the means which enabled them to start on a successful career. He was a man of mark; and whatever be thought of the ideal he pursued with such zeal and singleness of purpose, he has left his enduring impress on the country of his adoption.

BOOKS.

BY ALEXANDER MCLACHLAN.

"My library was dukedom large enough."

WE

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-Shakspeare.

But

E once heard an enthusiastic hunter, after an exciting day's sport, exclaim, "Surely the man who does not love hunting can have no soul!" The hunting spirit never having got hold of us, we therefore could hardly join in the sentiment. But we have sometimes thought that the man who does not love books must be sadly deficient somewhere in the upper story. We have even wondered if he could have any upper story at all, when he preferred to live away down among the grubs and the gossips, to associating with the great immortals. be that as it may, some men never read any thing but the "prices current," catalogues and almanacs. Others read merely for amusement, or to help to pass an idle hour, or put in a rainy day, and could do well enough without it. But with us books are an every day necessity, and have been so ever since that long delightful summer of our boyhood when we lived on the Island of Juan Fernandez in company with Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday. That was our first acquaintance with books-it was indeed an era in our existence, for it shaped and coloured our life-long journey. After leaving the island we set out on our travels with Mungo Park through the centre of Africa; and after "doing that region," we started on a voyage of discovery with Captain Cook, and after circumnavigating the world, returned only to set out again for "fresh fields and pastures new"-to range through the kingdoms of science, literature and art. We are likely to continue our journey to the end of life's chapter, for the more we travel the farther

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the fields extend, and are all the time growing more wonderful and incomprehensible, "And realms of which we nothing know, Keep multiplying as we go." "Books," says Milton, are not absolutely dead things, but do convey a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul was, whose progeny they were: nay, they do preserve as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them." To us they are veritable beings, living souls, dear companions! to whom we go in joy or in sorrow. Our experiences, good or bad, are not new to them, for they have felt exactly as we feel, and can therefore sympathize with us, and in the deepest and the darkest hour we hear their voices whispering "courage."

Books are the mirrors of humanity; yea, the stage on which the dead appear to reenact "life's tragedy again." Most people do not believe in ghosts. But look there! what is that? Lo! it is the "melancholy Dane," still soliloquizing, and exclaiming,

"To be or not to be!"

And here comes something far more wonderful than any ghost, even Falstaff himself, lacking not an ounce of flesh, and hale and hearty as when he fought the "men in buckram." There also comes the knight of La Mancha, still prancing on his Rosinante and exclaiming, "There is still sunshine on the wall." Lift a volume, open the leaves, and lo! as if by magic, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon and Assyria appear, and pass like panoramic pictures before us, with Britain and America in the distance, and many more following each other like the progeny

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of Banquo, as if the line would stretch out voices, and introduced even to the shanty to the crack of doom." of the backwoodsman, company that a king might envy.

There are some books of which we never weary, for they are fresh and new after the fiftieth reading. We never fathom them, for they are deep wells of thought, from which the bucket always comes up overflowing. Every time we drink at those unexhaustible fountains we are refreshed; every time we look into their unfathomable depths we are filled with awe and wonder, and are elevated thereby. When we open a real book we cease to be ourselves, we get into the author's sphere, and he literally takes possession of us; we see with his eyes, we hear with his ears, think with his mind, and judge with his understanding. He recreates all nature for us anew, and we are mirthful or melancholy at his pleasure. If we open "Paradise Lost," we are instantly taken away from this little petty peddling, bargain-making time, and transported into the dawn of a glorious day, and the beings with whom we come in contact are all of preternatural stature, and have a shadowy grandeur about them; and we wonder at the degeneracy of mankind. People tell us they do not believe in magic, and yet what magic there is in thus giving to "airy nothings a local habitation and a name"! What magic in thus giving to immaterial thought a permanent form, which defies the power of space, of death, and time! We can never be without good company if we have a few good books, for they contain the life experiences of the greatest men. We can have their opinion on all the great problems that have perplexed mankind. They are raised above the petty passions and interests of the hour, and talk to us with a sublime serenity. What a joy they have always been to the sad and the solitary! They have peopled the desert, and filled the solitude with aerial

At one period it was our lot to live away back in the bush, where intercourse with our fellow men was rare, and save for the few books we had, the solitude would have been insupportable. But we were not without company, for

My cabin seemed a whole world-wide,
Kings entered in without their pride,
And warriors laid their swords aside.

There came the Saxon, there the Celt,
And all had knelt where I had knelt,
For all had felt what I had felt.

I saw, from clime and creed apart,
Heaving beneath their robes of art,
One universal human heart.

And Homer and Sir Walter Scott
Came to me in that humble cot,
And cheered with tales my lowly lot.

And Burns came singing songs divine,
His great heart heaving in each line;
A glorious company was mine!

I was the brother of the great!
Shakespeare himself on me did wait
With leaves torn from the Book of Fate.

They asked me not of rank or creed,
And yet supplied my spirit's need:
O they were comforters indeed!

And showed me by their magie art,
Those awful things at which we start-
That hover round the human heart-

Fate, ever watching with her shears,
And mixing all our hopes with fears,
And drenching all our joys with tears.

They showed how contradictions throng-
How, by our weakness, we are strong;
And how we're righted by the wrong ;

Unveiled new regions to my sight,
Transformed the weary winter's night,
Into a spring-time of delight.

THE NINE HOURS' MOVEMENT.

BY C. HENRY STEPHENS.

IT

T is not our purpose to argue this question from any particular point of view, or to speak of it with any object other than that of obtaining as much light on the question as possible, and aiding society, as far as in us lies, in its proper solution.

It is a question-next to that of war or peace, of life or death-of paramount importance to all classes, and affects all in a greater or less degree. It is a question, moreover, of so complicated and intricate a nature, that it requires not only the most careful study, but facilities for examining it in all its bearings, in order to form anything like a just idea of its operation and results. We therefore propose to consider it by the light of whatever data and sagacity we can bring to bear upon it, from these two points: From what it springs. To what it tends.

That there is a great social revolution going on in the world, is a fact patent to the most casual observer. Nor is this to be considered in itself as new or strange. At no period in the history of the world, we believe, has its social condition been entirely at rest-at least among civilized nations. The nature of civilization is revolutionary and progressive. Among savage and barbarous nations such as the negroes of South Africa or the natives of the South Sea Isles -the social status is necessarily always the same. It is true they acknowledge a chief or king, as the case may be ; but besides these, distinctions of class-of high and low, of rich and poor, of educated and illiterate, of employer and working-man-are unknown. And as it is these which constitute what

we call social condition, the status must
ever remain the same, the elements of
change being wanting. But in civilized life
these elements are as numerous as the sands
on the sea shore, and subject to almost as
many changes. Those which are upper-
most to-day, airing themselves in all the
sunshine of prosperity, are to-morrow borne
down by the waves of an ever-changing ex-
istence and buried fathoms deep in obscur-
ity. In like manner others, who for long
years have remained unseen, unknown, un-
heard of, are continually being brought to
the surface by the same influences. The
more modern and advanced the civilization,
the more rapid and varied these changes be-
come the more numerous the elements
and the more indistinguishable the shades
of difference between them.
tion was in its crude and early stages the
distinctions between class and class were
more marked and striking and the muta-
tions less rapid. Whole centuries were re-
quired to effect as great a revolution in the
social arrangements of a people then as can
now be accomplished in a single year. The
action was more like the encroachments of
the ocean on its banks, than the shifting of
the sands which composed them.

When civiliza

These lines of separation, however, instead of being worn away and obliterated by the process, have, on the contrary, been parcelled out and divided up into innumerable smaller ones; so that in a division of society, where one line could be drawn before, there may now be drawn twenty. The working-man commenced as a serf and the employer as a lord. It was so in old Rome,

and it was so also in new Britain. The changes in social status were slow, and the progress of civilization was still slower. The former, indeed, may be said to have been a constituent and essential part of the latter; whether it will continue so, or not, still remains to be seen. In the course of ages, the great wall of separation between the employer and working-man was broken down. The serf was made free; was conceded the right of enjoying the fruits of his labours; was conceded the right to liberty of action, with in certain restrictions necessary to the protection and welfare of society; was conceded the right of education and the right to call himself a representative man and a constituent part of the state.

But the breaking up of one distinction created a hundred others new." The right of the working-man to the fruit of his own labour gave rise to an aristocracy of wealth, and in process of time to a thousand subordinate distinctions of this nature; and the right of education, to a thousand differences in learning and intelligence. In this manner society has become so complicated and the interests of society so varied and conflicting, that legislation is entirely unable to keep pace with it; and all the experience of the past, all the wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and all the advantages of the present generation, utterly fail to furnish our modern economists with a solution of the social problems of the day. Unceasingly, remorselessly the stream of time carries away now that pleasant point of land on which thousands have stood securely in bygone days and watched the rolling of its tide; and now that jutting rock, which was once so firm and strong as to challenge the admiration of all, leaves the statesman, who has devoted all his life to these questions, lost in bewilderment and doubt and unable to do more than utter the most random speculations as to the result.

Throughout all these changes it is worthy of remark, that the career of the working-man

has resembled very much a triumphal progress, in the midst of which the words "Onward and Upward" have ever been conspicuous. The serf has possessed himself of freedom, of education, of representation, and of a power which, in this work-aday world, controls, to a great extent, the operations of trade, and dictates terms even at the foot of the throne.

The working-man becomes a guild, a league, a body corporate, at whose meetings the highest in the land are proud to preside -a political army at whose head are found those of great intellect and of titled birth, both alike ambitious of leading them on. Have they anything to ask of the state, hundreds of supple tongues are ready to become their champions; have they a grievance to redress or a whim to carry out, an impecunious press stands willing to espouse their cause. They are "The People," and woe to the man or the institution which would say them nay.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, notwithstanding the advantages which the working-man of to-day possesses over him of ten, five or one hundred years ago, it is unfortunately too true that he is but the working-man after all. He is the man who labours from a stated hour in the morning until a stated hour in the evening to earn bread for his family and himself; he is the man who lives in a humble tenement, who dresses in a humble garb and, socially, commands the least influence and respect This we fear must continue to be the normal and unalterable condition of the working-man despite all the changes of time and the concessions of his fellow-creatures. It is impossible, we well know, for all to be wealthy, for all to be capitalists and employers, and, that being so, it is unavoidable that he who has least money, who has the fewest elements of social strength in his possession. shall occupy, in appearance at least, a posi tion inferior to his who commands both money and influence. This is an inevitable

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