_Experimental_ philosophy--asking a man to lend you money. _Moral_ philosophy--refusing to do it.
SYDNEY SMITH, once upon a time, despatched a pretentious octavo, in the _Edinburgh_, with a critique, one paragraph in length; that achievement is matched by the disposal of a work in the _Courier and Enquirer_, as follows, by ingeniously employing the opening sentence of the book itself:--
"_The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia._ A Tale by SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL. D. A new edition, with illustrations. 12mo., pp. 206. New York: C. S. FRANCIS & CO.
"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of _Rasselas_, Prince of Abyssinia."
SUTTON was part of the demesne of John of Gaunt, the celebrated Duke of Lancaster, who gifted it to an ancestor of the proprietor, Sir J. M. Burgoyne, as appears from the following quaint lines:--
"I, John of Gaunt, Do give and do grant, Unto Roger Burgoyne, And the heirs of his loin, Both Sutton and Potton, Until the world's rotten."
A KENTUCKIAN visited a merchant at New York, with whom, after dinner, he drank wine and smoked cigars, spitting on the carpet, much to the annoyance of his host, who desired a spittoon to be brought for his troublesome visitor; he, however, pushed it away with his foot, and when it was replaced, he kicked it away again, quite unaware of its use. When it had been thrice replaced, the Kentuckian drawled out to the servant who had brought it: "I tell you what; you've been pretty considerable troublesome with that ere thing, I guess; if you put it there again, I'm hung if I don't spit in it."
MR. LANDSEER, the best living animal painter, once asked the late Rev. Sydney Smith if he would grant him a sitting, whereupon the Rev. Canon biblically replied--"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?"
"DO you want to buy a real lot of butter?" said a Yankee notion dealer, who had picked up a load at fifty different places, to a Boston merchant.
"What kind of butter is it?" asked the buyer.
"The clean quill; all made by my wife; a dairy of forty cows, only two churnings."