Lord Shaftesbury is a man of many gifts, but none
of these gifts certainly can have been received by him with a better grace than that presented to him on Wednesday by the costermongers, of whose society he is president,—a valuable donkey. The donkey was led up stairs to the platform of the Forester's Hall, in Wilder- ness Row, Goswell Road, where the Earl presided, and was formally delivered over to him, with a eulogy on the donkey's good quali- ties, especially his taste for good company and good living. The Earl, in thanking the costermongers for their gift, said "he would send his newly-acquired friend down to the country, where he would be well treated by his grand-children. When he (th3 Earl) passed away from this life, he desired to have no more said of him than that he had done his duty whilst in it, as the poor donkey did his, with patience and unmurmuring resignation." Sterne's sen- timental reverie on a dead donkey was inferior in every respect to Lord Shaftesbnry's pathetic praise of the living one. Indeed, he hit the very quality which donkeys simulate, if they do not possess,—resignation as distinguished both from mere endur- ance and from stolid indifference. Alone, almost, among animala the donkey can really sigh.
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