This reason, and the great merit of the young man, decided Azora. 'After all,' said she, 'when my husband passes from the world of yesterday into the world of to-morrow over the bridge Tchinavar, the angel Asrael will not refuse to admit him because his nose is a little shorter in the second life than in the first.'
So taking a razor in her hand, she went to the tomb of her husband, bathed it with her tears, and approached to cut off his nose as he lay extended in the coffin. Zadig sprang up, holding his nose with one hand, and seizing the razor with the other. 'Madam!' he cried, 'say no more against the widow Cosron! The idea of cutting off my nose is quite equal to that of turning a water-course!'
And that is the end of our other story.
The most sincere of us, alas! are always hypocrites, but never so much as when we bring our grief before the eyes of the world.
'De quelque désespoir qu'une âme soit atteinte
La douleur est toujours moins forte que la plainte
Toujours un peu de faste entre parmi les pleurs.'
[LITERARY NOTICES.]
Etiquette; or a Guide to the Usages of Society; with a Glance at Bad Habits. By Count Alfred D'Orsay. Number Six of the 'Brother Jonathan' Monthly Library. New-York: Wilson and Company.
We opened this little work with avidity. It is the production of one whose fame, as an accomplished leader and arbiter in fashionable life, has preceded it for some years throughout the United States, and may well impart to it the weight of grave authority. We read it to the close without interruption, and with the greater interest, from finding in it, as we went on, much more than a bare list of rules of intercourse; and we rose from our chair, gratified by the perusal; full of good feeling toward its author; and with a passage from the divine Jeremy Taylor hovering in our thoughts. This is it:
'The Greek that designed to make the most exquisite picture that could be imagined, fancied the eye of Chione, and the hair of Pœgnium, and Tarsia's lip, Philenium's chin, and the forehead of Delphia; and set all these upon Melphidippa's neck, and thought that he should outdo both art and nature. But when he came to view the proportions, he found that what was excellent in Tarsia did not agree with the other excellency of Philenium; and although singly they were rare pieces, yet in the whole they made a most ugly face.'