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ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. From Fraser's Magazine. A DISCOURSE OF IMMATURITY; OR, CONCERNING VEAL. THE man who, in his progress through life, has listened with attention to the conversation of human beings; who has carefully read the writings of the best English authors; who has made himself well acquainted with the history and usages of his native land; and who has meditated much on all he has seen and read; must have been led to the firm conviction that by Veal, those who speak the English language in tend to denote the flesh of calves; and that by a calf is intended an immature ox or cow. A calf is a creature in a temporary and progressive stage of its being. It will not always be a calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to be a calf. And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage, should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than immature beef. There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral development; but provided only it die as a calf porvided only that its meat can fitly be styled Veal-this will be characteristic of it, that the meat shall be immature meat. It may be very good, very nutritious and palatable; some people may like it better than beef, and may feed upon it with the liveliest satisfaction; but when it is fairly and deliberately put to us, it must be admitted, even by such as like Veal the best, that Veal is but an immature production of nature. I take Veal therefore, as the emblem of Immaturity; of that which is now in a stage out of which it must grow; of that which, as time goes on, will grow older, will probably grow better, will certainly grow very different. That is what I mean by Veal. And now, my reader and friend, you will discern the subject about which I trust we are to have some pleasant and not unprofitable thought together. You will readily believe that my subject is not that material Veal which may be beheld and purchased in the butchers' shops. I am not now to treat of its varied qualities, of the sustenance which it yields, of the price at which it may be procured, or of the laws according to which that price rises and falls. I am not going to take you to the green fields in which the creature which yielded the veal was fed, or to discourse of the blossoming hawthorn hedges from whose midst it was reft away. Neither shall I speak of the rustic life, the toils, cares, and fancies of the farm-house near which it spent its brief lifetime. The Veal of which I intend to speak is Moral Veal, or (to speak with entire accuracy), Veal Intellectual, Moral, and Esthetical. By Veal I understand the immature productions of the human mind; immature compositions, immature opinions, feelings, and tastes. I wish to think of the work, the views, the fancies, the emotions, which are yielded by the human soul in its immature stages: while the calf (so to speak) is only growing into the ox; while the clever boy, with his absurd opinions and feverish feelings and fancies, is developing into the mature and sober-minded man. And if I could but rightly set out the thoughts which have at many different times occurred to me on this matter, if one could catch and fix the vague glimpses and passing intuitions of solid unchanging truth, if the subject on which one has thought long and felt deeply were always that on which one could write best, and could bring out to the sympathy of others what a man himself has felt, what an excellent essay this would be! But it will not be so; for as I try to grasp the thoughts I would set out, they would melt away and elude me. It is like trying to catch and keep the rainbow hues you have seen the sunshine cast upon the spray of a waterfall, when you try to catch the tone, the thoughts, the feelings, the atmosphere of early youth. There can be no question at all as to the fact, that clever young men and women, when their minds begin to open, when they begin to think for themselves, do pass through a stage of mental development which they by and by quite outgrow; and entertain opinions and beliefs, and feel emotions, on which afterwards they look back with no sympathy or approval. This is a fact as certain as that a calf grows into an ox, or that veal, if spared to grow, will become beef. But no analogy between the material and the moral must be pushed too far. There are points of difference between material and moral Veal. A calf knows it is a calf. It may think itself bigger and wiser than an ox, but it knows it is not an ox. man writing in an ambitious and rhetorical And if it be a reasonable calf, modest, style, and prompted to do so by the sponand free from prejudice, it is well aware taneous fervor of your heart and readiness of that the joints it will yield after its de- your imagination, you will feel now little mise, will be very different from those of sympathy even with the literary style of that the stately and well-consolidated ox which early composition; you will see extravaruminates in the rich pasture near it. But gance and bombast, where once you saw only the human boy often thinks he is a man, eloquence and graphic power. And as for and even more than a man. He fancies that the graver and more important matter of the his mental stature is as big and as solid as thought of the discourse, I think you will be it will ever become. He fancies that his aware of a certain indefinable shallowness mental productions-the poems and essays and crudity. Your growing experience has he writes, the political and social views he borne you beyond it. Somehow you feel it forms, the moods of feeling with which he does not come home to you, and suit you as regards things are just what they may al- you would wish it should. It will not do. ways be, just what they ought always to be. That old sermon you cannot preach now, till If spared in this world, and if he be one of you have entirely re-cast and re-written it. those whom years make wiser, the day comes But you had no such notion when you wrote when he looks back with amazement and the sermon. You were satisfied with it. shame on those early mental productions. You thought it even better than the disHe discerns now how immature, absurd, and extravagant they were; in brief, how vealy. But at the time, he had not the least idea that they were so. He had entire confidence in himself; not a misgiving as to his own ability and wisdom. You, clever young student of eighteen years old, when you wrote your prize essay, fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay; and not Macaulay in that stage of vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen. Well, read over your essay now at thirty, and tell us what you think of it. courses of men as clever as yourself, and ten or fifteen years older. Your case was as though the youthful calf should walk beside the sturdy ox, and think itself rather bigger. Let no clever young reader fancy from what has been said, that I am about to make an onslaught upon clever young men. I remember too distinctly how bitter and indeed ferocious I used to feel, about eleven or twelve years ago, when I have heard men of more than middle age and less than middling ability speak with contemptuous depreciation of the productions and doings of men considerably their juniors, and vastly their superiors; describing them as boys and as clever And you, clever, warm-lads, with looks of dark malignity. There are hearted, enthusiastic young preacher of few more disgusting sights, than the envy and twenty-four, wrote your sermon; it was very jealousy of their juniors, which may be seen ingenious, very brilliant in style, and you never thought but that it would be felt by mature-minded Christian people as suiting their case, as true to their inmost experience. You could not see why you might not preach as well as a man of forty. And if people in middle age had complained that, eloquent as your preaching was, they found it suited them better and profited them more to listen posterous airs of superiority. I do not claim to the plainer instructions of some good man with gray hair, you would not have understood their feeling; and you might perhaps have attributed it to many motives rather than the true one. But now, at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will venture to say, that if you were a really clever and eloquent young in various malicious, commonplace old men ; as there is hardly a more beautiful and pleasing sight than the old man hailing, and counselling, and encouraging the youthful genius which he knows far surpasses his own. And I, my young friend of two-andtwenty, who, relatively to you, may be regarded as old, am going to assume no pre to be a bit wiser than you; all I claim is to be older. I have outgrown your stage; but I was once such as you, and all my sympathies are with you yet. But it is a difficulty in the way of the essayist, and of all who set out opinions which they wish to be received and acted on by their fellow-creatures, that they seem, by the very act of offering ad vice to others, to claim to be wiser and better | seemed that you had thus written five years than those whom they advise. But in reality before! What Veal,-and oh, what a calf he it is not so. The opinions of the essayist or must have been who wrote it! It is a diffiof the preacher, if deserving of notice at all, cult question, to which the answer cannot be are so because of their inherent truth, and elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this not because he expresses them. Estimate world? But every candid and sensible man them for yourself, and give them the weight of middle age knows thoroughly well the anwhich you think their due. And be sure of swer to the question, Who was the greatest this, that the writer, if earnest and sincere, ad- fool that he himself ever knew? And after dressed all he said to himself as much as to any all, it is your diary, especially if you were one else. This is the thing which redeems all wont to introduce into it poetical remarks and didactic writing or speaking from the charge moral reflections, that will mainly help you to of offensive assumption and self-assertion. the humiliating conclusion. Other things, It is not for the preacher, whether of moral some of which I have already named, will or religious truth, to address his fellows as point in the same direction. Look at the outside sinners, worse than himself, and need- | prize essays you wrote when you were a ing to be reminded of that of which he does not need to be reminded. No, the earnest preacher preaches to himself as much as to any in the congregation; it is from the picture ever before him in his own weak and wayward heart, that he learns to reach and describe the hearts of all others, if, indeed, he do so at all. And it is the same with lesser things. It is curious and it is instructive to remark how heartily men, as they grow towards middle age, despise themselves as they were a few years since. It is a bitter thing for a man to confess that he is a fool; but it costs little effort to declare that he was a fool a good while ago. Indeed, a tacit compliment to his present self is involved in the latter confession; it suggests the reflection what progress he has made, and how vastly he has improved, since then. When a man informs us that he was a very silly fellow in the year 1851, it is assumed that he is not a very silly fellow in the year 1861. It is as when the merchant with ten thousand a year, sitting at his sumptuous table, and sipping his 41 claret, tells you how, when he came as a raw lad from the country, he used often to have to go without his dinner. He knows that the plate, the wine, the massively elegant apartment, the silent servants so alert yet so impassive, will appear to join in chorus with the obvious suggestion, "You see he has not to go without his dinner now!" Did you ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when you were sixteen; or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when twenty; or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five? Was not your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency? What extravagant, silly stuff it boy at school; look even at your earlier prize essays written at college (though of these last I have something to say hereafter); look at the letters you wrote home when away at school or even at college, especially if you were a clever boy, trying to write in a graphic and witty fashion; and if you have reached sense at last (which some, it may be remarked, never do), I think you will blush even through the unblushing front of manhood, and think what a terrific, unutterable, conceited, intolerable blockhead you were. It is not till people attain somewhat mature years that they can rightly understand the wonderful forbearance their parents must have shown in listening patiently to the frightful nonsense they talked and wrote. I have already spoken of sermons. If you go early into the church, say at twenty-three or twenty-four, and write sermons regularly and diligently, you know what landmarks they will be of your mental progress. The first runnings of the stream are turbid, but it clears itself into sense and taste, month by month and year by year. You wrote many sermons in your first year or two; you preached them with entire confidence in them, and they did really keep up the attention of the congregation in a remarkable way. You accumulate in a box a store of that valuable literature and theology, and when by and by you go to another parish, you have a comfortable feeling that you have a capital stock to go on with. You think that any Monday morning when you have the prospect of a very busy week, or when you feel very weary, you may resolve that you shall write no sermon that week, but just go and draw forth one from the box. I have already said what you will |