certificate, without which it cannot procure employment. To employ any,
person under twenty-one, without such a certificate, is illegal, and
punished by a fixed fine, as is almost every other offence in this part
of Germany; and the fines are never remitted, which makes punishment
always certain. The schoolmaster is paid much in the same way as in
Scotland; by a house, a garden, and sometimes a field, and by a small
salary from the parish, and by fixed rates for the children.

A second law, which is coeval with the school law, renders it illegal
for any young man to marry before he is twenty-five, or any young woman
before she is eighteen; and a young man, at whatever age he wishes to
marry, must show, to the police and the priest of the commune where he
resides, that he is able, and has the prospect, to provide for a wife
and family.--_London's Mag. Nat. Hist._


* * * * *

EATING AND WRITING.


Ovid, Horace, and Virgil all frequented the tables of the great; Cato
warmed his virtue with wine; Shakspeare kept up his _verve_ with stolen
venison; Steele and Addison wrote their best papers over a bottle; Sir
Walter Scott is famed for good housekeeping; and I know authors who love
to dine like lords. Even booksellers do their spiriting more gently for
good fare, and bid for an author the most spiritedly after dinner.

There is not a more vulgar mistake than that of confounding good eating
with gluttony and excess. It is not because a man gets twenty or