and she would select the most auspicious moment for her commission. Kezia loved business. Living with "my cousin," though it had its advantages, was dreadfully dull work, and she had a natural antipathy to stagnation. She liked, too, to be of consequence. After one of Mr. Case's visits, she was made to feel that she was of none at all; and now to be entrusted with a stirring business, one, too, that required good faith and discretion to discharge, was a delightful opening in the mist; so, drawing her chair close to Anthony, she listened in every fibre, as he laid before her the story he had vainly hoped to lay before his aunt. "Mr. King," she exclaimed, when he concluded, "I believe you to be a very injured man." "Unfortunate," said Anthony; "some get rougher seas than others." 66 Injured," repeated Kezia; "I have had many and many a lubrication on the subject, and I have told my cousin more than once that you ought not to be driven to emigrate when your own father's sister is as rich as Creases." "I would not mind emigrating," said Anthony, "if I could do it; but whatever plan I enter on, something arises that turns me back in it; directly I look at an open door it shuts in my face." "And what does that show?" said Kezia. "Why, that you are not to go out of your proper sphere of life (let it be between you and me, Mr. King), but your aunt must come to a proper view of your rights, and deal by you as being of her own flesh and blood." "If she would spare us a lawsuit, and yield to what seems to be plainly justice," said Anthony, "I would not ask for bounty from her; that small estate would amply suffice for all my wants, and enable me to help a friend in need.” "Worthy of your name, Mr. King; in short, you can say with the poet 66 say "Enough I reckon wealth, A mean, the surest lot, That lies too high for base contempt, Too low for envy's shot.'" Dear "What! say I have no hopes but one? Mr. King, I should be telling ever such a story. I hope all manner of things now and then. Not that I am discontented, but somehow there is nothing so pleasant in the pleasantest life but what one might wish to better it." "But the poet here speaks of a hope which reigns above all earthly desires and cares," said Anthony; "one so sublime, so strong, so sweet, that when it does in truth take hold on the heart, it is amazing how it subdues it, so that for earthly things, as it is written, we are made able to weep as though we wept not, and to rejoice as though we rejoiced not.' You know such learning is the work of a life." "Ah, that's a state," said Kezia, intimating by a long shake of the head that it was attainable by very few, if any, and certainly not by her. "It is the state of every true Christian, more or less," said Anthony. "Some, indeed, forget their privileges, and allow the good seed in their hearts to be choked with the cares and riches of this life. Foolish souls they are, for what can this life give that is worthy to be compared with heavenly glory?" "Ah!" said Kezia, with a sigh, looking down and folding her hands on her knee, as Anthony repeated— 26 I have no hopes but one, Which is of heavenly reign, "In the right sense you will own that our friend the poet speaks the truth, and that we may truly use his words without any bombast or sentiment." "Here is Miss King!" said Kezia, starting up, as that lady entered the room. HE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. E must have a poor conception of wit who sits down to define it. The man who was asked to define beauty replied well, that this was the question Yes," said Anthony, "and I can go on and of a blind man. Childe Harold's criticism of the "My wishes are but few, All easy to fulfil; I make the limits of my power The bounds unto my will. "I have no hopes but one, Which is of heavenly reign, My motto is, Thy will be done, So I Thy kingdom gain."" Ah," said Kezia, thoughtfully, when he had ceased, "it's a sweet little poem that; are you fond of the poets, Mr. King?" "Those that I understand; plain sense like that I like very much." "So do I, so do I," said Kezia. "That little piece is in a book that I had when I was a girl; but although it is a pretty piece enough, I don't think I could say the whole of it through, not to mean it, could you ?" "Yes I can," said Anthony; "in some measure at least." "I wish I could," said Kezia, as, looking steadily into his face, she read there a confirmation of his words. "You can if you will," said Anthony; "wishes are too often excuses." Venus of Medici is the best on that subject: "Away! there needs no words nor terms precise, The paltry jargon of the marble mart Where Pedantry gulls Folly-we have eyes, Blood, pulse, and breath confirm the Dardan shepherd's prize." It is the same with wit. To write a dissertation on it is to imply that we have no true sense of its subtle elastic nature. It is something that we cannot fix, but is like one of those compounds in chemistry which are never found in their elementary state, but are only to be tested by some similar reagent. It is wit finds out wit, as when Greek meets Greek, and then comes the tug of war. It flashes out in intellectual word combat. The truest wit, like that of Shakespeare, is the fire struck out when a Benedick crosses swords with a Beatrice, a Mercutio What the with a Benvolio, a Speed with a Launce. quintessence of the old chemists was, that wit is to the other qualities of mind. Sir J. Davies, in his great poem on the "Immortality of the Soul," has struck off as good a definition of wit as we know: "Who can in memory, or wit, or will, Or air, or earth, or water find? What alchemist can draw with all his skill The quintessence of these out of the mind Where others have failed we shall not repeat the | attempt. Dr. Barrow's interminable definition of wit is too well known to need quotation, but it illustrates by its Brobdingnagian length and diffuseness what Charles II said of Barrow's sermons, that he was the most unfair preacher he ever listened to, for he left nothing to be said by others. The mistake of all the definitions of wit that we have met with lies in this, that they confound the accidents with the essentials. Wit is the lightning flash which leaps out when two clouds come together -it is followed by the rumbling report and the pattering rain-drops; but these are its concomitants, not the thing itself. The report assists us to measure the distance at which we are from the cloud itself, but this is all. True wit is spontaneous; the source of laughter in others, it seldom laughs itself. One of the wittiest men we ever knew flashed off his jokes in this natural way; it was the manner of Swift. He was an Irishman, and we once travelled with him by express from Bath to London. One of his companions was a slow and matter-of-fact Saxon, somewhat of a Boswell-fond of good company, but certainly neither witty himself, nor the occasion of wit in others. Indeed, his discernment of our friend's jokes became to us a kind of time-table as good as "Bradshaw" itself, and far more trustworthy. As the report travels after the lightning flash, so peals of laughter in the Box tunnel assured us that the Bath jokes had entered that thick cranium, and so it was all the rest of the journey. It was a five miles interval throughout between the Celtic wit and the Saxon appreciation of it. We were never more struck with the differences of mind than with the sudden ebullitions of fancy in the one case, and the patient, plodding determination to find out what it all meant in the other. They were excellent companions and sworn friends, but the one was certainly a foil to the other. Thunder and Lightning, as we called the stout party and his facetious friend, parted company with us at Paddington, and we have not seen them since. Mercutio, that prince of wit whom Shakespeare killed, as the critics say, or else Mercutio would have killed him, came nearer a definition of wit in his account of Queen Mab's chariot, with its "waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs, the traces of the smallest spider's web, the collars of the moonshine's watery beams, the whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film," and she herself "no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman." Wit is thus, to continue Mercutio's description, like dreams "Which are the children of an idle brain, We should despair of defining wit in any other way than this. It is the Queen Mab of mind, the fairies' dance in the ring, and we must be discreet about it. "Those fairy favours," as Dryden well remarks of true wit, are lost when not concealed." tiful," selects this as the perfection of chiaro-scuro, but to our mind the thunderbolt is just as intelligible without this blacksmith's apparatus of forges and anvils underneath Etna to account for a flash in the skies. It is the same with wit. If it can be manufactured it is not true wit. It is no kindness to true wit to let us into the craft and mystery of how it is struck off. If the truth were known, the best things are those which are let off, as it were, by accident. A bull is not exactly a witty saying, it is in fact a witticism spoilt-the amphora on the wheel that comes out a common pipkin. But as the best amphora (to use Horace's simile) is only a wellformed pitcher, so the best jokes have not seldom sprung out of some slip of the tongue, some confusion of metaphor, out of which the mind has stumbled into a happy thought. To quote instances would seem unfair to the professional wit, yet without an instance the reader would scarcely credit us how closely related (to use a well-known alliteration) blundering and plundering are to each other. Few wits have the magnanimity to confess that their best inventions are mostly finds. As Sam Slick tells us the story of his hitting the bottle by a chance shot on board ship, and earning the reputation of a dead shot for the rest of the voyage, which he applies to explain his success in the "Clockmaker," Charles Lamb in the same way stammered into an excellent pun, which he never would have hit off if he had meant to be witty. Some one was complaining of the Duke of Cumberland's coolness of manner. "Yes, but you forget," said Charles Lamb, "he is the Duke of Cu-cu-cumber-land." It was his stammering speech which helped him to slice the cucumber so neatly, and it showed no little candour in Lamb to confess that the joke was a happy accident. There is no more curious instance of the part being taken for the whole than the modern use of the word wit. It is degraded in modern English as the word esprit or spirituel is in modern French. "What are the Lords spirituel?" Madame de Staël asked when in England: "Are they so named because more witty than other lords?" The lively Frenchwoman, who was certainly not passing a joke on the right reverend bench, could not understand spiritual except in the secondary and degraded sense to which it has sunk in modern French. It is the same with wit in English. Its original use is as a synonym for wisdom. Wit is the act, and wisdom the state of knowing. Witan to know, with its preterite wit (of which we suppose the Scotch wut is a kind of supine), had two forms, to wiss, and to Thus there sprung up the two derivative nouns, wit and wisdom; wit is what is only weeted, wisdom is what is wissed. In both cases it was the thing known and the fact that we knew it-to know, and to know that we know, marking two distinct stages of intelligence. Men rose in this way from wit to wisdom. Every wise man was witty, though every witty man was not wise. Even in modern English we have not quite lost this proper sense of wit. We speak of a man at his wits' end, of a man living by his wits. In Shakespeare the five wits are spoken of as we use the term our five senses. Thus Mercutio says, in "Romeo and Juliet:"— weet. We are not going then to lift the veil of Isis, or disclose the mysteries of this Bona Dea. To take the reader into the laboratory and describe the manufacture of wit would be like Virgil's attempt to describe the way in which the Cyclops forged the bolts of Jove-" tres torti imbres," three twisted showers, etc. Burke, on the "Sublime and Beau- So again in "Much Ado about Nothing:" "Alas' "Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits in our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed by one." How it came about that "blessed common sense, that rarest gift of heaven," lost the name of wit, and fancy, that impertinent wild-goose spirit, usurped the whole use of the word to itself, has never been made clear. It was comparatively late, however, in the history of the language. When we speak of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, we do not mean the humourists merely (we shall have to speak of that word by-andby). The phrase includes the men who were both wise and witty. If Addison was a wit in the modern sense of the word, he was certainly something more. Dick Steele was a wit and little else; so was Arbuthnot; but Pope and Dryden, Addison and Swift, were wits who would be remembered if all their jibes and quips of fancy were as dead as those of poor Yorick. The professional wit, the modern joker of small jokes rehearsed at dinner tables, and then dressed up for our comic journals, had not then come into existence. The modern wit is the sausage-maker redivivus of Aristophanes' play. He is a farceur, or stuffer (this is the meaning of the word), who stuffs a thin bladder of fancy with snips and cuttings from old puns and plays on words, and passes off his old Joe Millers' on us as new wares. There is too much of this base metal of wit among us. We often ask ourselves who are the people and what their conception of true wit can be like, who buy the jest-books and take in the weekly comic journals which abound in our day. It must be because we are a practical people, and so entirely prosaic in daily life, that we can find amusement out of such sorry stuff. Swift and Defoe were genuine wits, but how few now read Swift's "Meditations on a Broomstick," or Defoe's account of the "Apparition of Mrs. Veal." To mention these is to put to the blush the farceurs of our comic press, the collectors of stale jokes in our popular jest-books. But enough of wit in general. It has sunk low enough when it has descended to the manufacture of puns. The sausage-making machine from which our comic press procures its weekly supply of fun, is a poor substitute for that ethereal compound of thought and fancy which in better days deserved the name of wit. The ethereal element of wit which is wanting in these base imitations of it is humour, and to this we now come. Humour and wit have been often contrasted, but to our mind they are only different sides of the same thing. Humour is the fountain out of which wit flows; the one is the oil and the other the well, and no amount of pumping will cause the oil to flow till the real spring is tapped. According to Professor Bain, humour is simply the laughable degradation of an object without malice, in a genial, kindly, good-natured way, and wit is an ingenious and unexpected play on words. According to this definition, humour "involves an element of the subjective." When we call a writer humorous, we have regard to the spirit of his ludicrous degradation; we imply that he is good-natured and bears no malice. When we call a writer witty, we have regard simply to the cleverness of his expression; he may be sarcastic as Swift, or humorous, like Steele. The proper antithesis to humour is satire-wit is common to both. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not reach the root of the distinction. To understand humour, we must go back, as in the case of wit, to its true etymology. It is, as the word implies, a metaphor, from a medical theory which held undisputed sway of the profession from Galen to Cullen and Hoffmann Till Galen's time there were humourists and solidists, and the theory of disease fluctuated between the two. But Galen adopted the humoural theory, and this decided the course of the profession, with a few exceptions, down to our own day, when the foundations of a sound pathology have been laid at last in the exact science of physiology. These humours were four-blood, phlegm, choler, and lymph-and according to their mixture the temperament was said to be sanguineous, phlegmatic, bilious, or lymphatic. This nomenclature of diseases, from their supposed seat in the juices of the body, not only suggested a wrong theory of medicine, and let loose on the world the Sangrados who lanced and leeched as if blood-letting were the only door through which to expel diseasethe humoural theory went farther; it infected our popular language. "Every man in his humour," as in Ben Jonson's play, was supposed to derive his character from the commixture of the four fluids. A false physiology suggested a wrong psychology, and humour, as it was called, became another name for character. All the oddities of human nature were accounted for by the action of the phlegm on the blood, of the lymph on the bile. Grave and reverend divines, like Burton, went into the anatomy of melancholy on these absurd physiological principles, and whoever wants to consult a repertory of and on the oddities of humour need not go beyond the pages of "Burton's Anatomy." A humourist thus became a phrase for one who conducts himself by his own fancy, who gratifies his own humour. What we should call in modern phrase an original or an eccentric character our forefathers described as a humourist. Bacon and Shakespeare speak of the peccant humours of the state to be purged or cut off, as the case might be. So late as Addison we find the "humourist in religion" described as "one who keeps to himself much more than he wants, and gives his superfluities to purchase heaven." Humour is thus character in action, and is thus contrasted with wit, which is simply intellect in action. Sprat, in his "History of the Royal Society," touches on this characteristic of humour and its connection with intellect. "Extraordinary men," he says, "of all ages are generally observed to be the greatest humourists; they are so full of the sweetness of their own conceptions that they become morose when they are drawn from them.' This is an excellent description, and touches off a well-known failing of men of humour. It is all very well to indulge their own vein of pleasantry, but it is nothing to them if they fail to carry others with them. Foote, the actor, was a humourist of this kind. Acting one night, and convulsing the whole house by his bursts of drollery, he observed a solid-looking countryman, with clenched jaws and leaden eye, as if he could not take in what it all meant. The applause of the entire house was nothing to Foote as long as this rustic sat on unmoved. At last, losing all patience, he went up to the footlights, leaned over, and bellowed like an ox in the face of the bucolic. Thus he touched the chord of sympathetic mirth. The clod of the valley now understood him, and burst out into peals of laughter. The humourist had carried his point-he had created a rapport between himself and the stupidest man in the house; like Wamba, the gooseherd and jester, he was driving his entire flock before him, not one of the flock was straying, and so Foote was happy. Of Foote, Johnson had a mortal aversion, as well as contempt, because Foote had ridiculed Johnson; but even the doctor could not resist this supreme humourist. The first time he was in company with Foote was at Fitzherbert's. "Having no good opinion of the fellow, I was resolved," Johnson says, "not to be pleased-and it is very difficult to please a man against his will. I went on eating my dinner pretty sullenly, affecting not to mind him, but the dog was so very comical that I was obliged to lay down my knife and fork, throw myself back upon my chair, and fairly laugh it out. No, sir; he was irresistible." Humourist as he was, Foote did not like the laugh to be turned against himself. On one occasion, as Boswell tells us, in a note to his "Life of Johnson," this took place. "When Mr. Foote was at Edinburgh he thought fit to entertain a numerous Scotch company, with a good deal of coarse jocularity at the expense of Dr. Johnson, imagining it would be acceptable. I felt this as not civil to me, but sat by patiently till he had exhausted his merriment on that subject, and then observed that surely Johnson must be allowed to have some sterling wit, and that I had heard him say a very good thing of Mr. Foote himself. Ah! my old friend Sam,' cried Foote, the man says bitter things; let us have it.' Upon which I told the story in which Johnson resembled Foote to a dog that has no power of comparing, and snatches a small piece of meat in the same way as a large. Foote in the same way thought superficially, and seized the first notions which occurred to his mind. Upon that," Boswell adds, "I never saw Foote so disconcerted. He looked grave and angry, and entered into a serious refutation of the justice of the remark. 'What, sir!' said he, "talk thus of a man of liberal education, a man who for years was at the University of Oxford-a man who has added sixteen new characters to the drama of his country!'" Humour is then, as the name implies, a certain waywardness of character. It is a river, but one that glideth at its own sweet will, and it becomes chafed and angry if any one tries to dam it up, or to bend it out of its own course. As in medicine, there were the rival schools of the humourists and the solidists; so in mind, there are the men of fancy and the men of fact, the latter the solidists, to whom things are as they appear-a yellow primrose is a yellow primrose, and it is nothing more-the latter, the humourists, brimming over with fancy, steeping all things in the rich hues of their imagination, and giving a fresh colour to life, such as it never had before, but which we instinctively recognise as true. There was humour, for instance, in Turner's bold remark when some one observed that he had never seen such sunsets as Turner put on canvas-"Don't you wish you could see them," thus throwing back the objection with the retort that we must bring imagination in order to see nature as she is. It was a profound thought of Keats. We have only to remark, in conclusion, that the quality of true wit is like mercy, in that it is not strained. If it does not flow, it must not be forced. Puns for wit, and mannerism for humour, are alike imitations so bad that the only punishment for the wretch who inflicts them on us is, that he should be left to laugh alone at his own jokes. As to the lower forms of facetiousness, charades, and so forth, I shall say nothing of such unpardonable trumpery. "If charades are made at all," as Sydney Smith observed, "they should be made without benefit of clergy; the offender should instantly be hurried off to execution, and be cut off in the middle of his dullness without being allowed to explain to his executioner why his first is like his second, or what is the resemblance between his fourth and his ninth.” But there is one thing more intolerable than the punner of puns, the riddler of riddles, and the chatterer of charades, or chatterations, as the Neapolitan phrase charade implies. It is the fast young man who, on the strength of a ready tongue and a copious command of slang, sets up for a wit. "Do you know, sir," said some one of this kind to Doan Swift, "that I have set up for a wit?" Then, young man, take my advice," was the Dean's reply," and sit down again." This is our parting advice to the young man who mistakes smartness for wit. If true wit be only nature to advantage dressed, the farther we go from nature the farther we stray from the true fountain of wit. Let old Fuller give us a parting word of advice on this subject: "To clothe low creeping matter with high-flown language, is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather lowers than raises the wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings. Some men's speeches are like the high mountains in Ireland having a dirty bog on the top of them; the very ridge of them in bigh words having nothing of worth but what rather stales than delights the auditor." THE MANDARIN'S DAUGHTER. E There he beheld unchanged the broad flood of the great "Son of the Ocean," rolling along majestically to the sea, with its deep volume of water more than a mile in width. Looking down the river, he saw the picturesque form of Silver Island, with its quaint temples embowered in autumnal foliage, their white walls gleaming in the rays of the morning sun, and the island itself cleaving the waters near the midchannel, so as to form an eddying torrent on each side, the dread of all navigators. On the other hand, looking up the stream he saw Golden Island, celebrated for its pictorial charms, the peculiar sanctity of its temples and pagoda, erected in ancient times by the disciples of Koong-foo-tsze (Confucius), Lao-kien, and; Fo. These islands appeared much the same as he had often seen them before, and so did the swelling hills on the opposite bank of the river. But alas! the flourishing city of Chin-Keang, which had formerly covered the site with more than fifty thousand houses, shops, and public buildings! Now the slopes of the hills were strewn with the débris of that once populous and wealthy emporium of commerce, and only a few wretched-looking inhabitants could be seen in the suburb. "There is another example of devastation," the mandarin remarked to his companion. "Is that the work of your chiefs, who wish to turn the country into a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. To me it looks more like as if they were making a Hellish Kingdom of Great Misery." encountered one of the "monster fire junks," as the natives call them-a British man-of-war, with the naval commander-in-chief on board, who was on his return from Nanking, after having a parley with the Taiping chiefs, who engaged not to fire on any vessels passing the city if they hoisted a distinctive foreign flag. As the noble frigate Imperieuse passed down tho winding reach every eye was fixed upon her until she passed out of view. Cut-sing was the first to venture upon a remark. "You are unjust, honourable sir! was the emissary's rejoinder. "The destruction you see was chiefly done by the 'imps,' who attacked the city on all sides by land and water, throwing in fireballs which set fire to the buildings, and slaying every one, friend or foe, who endeavoured to escape from the conflagration." Meng-kee doubted the accuracy of this statement, as he had heard that when the town was first taken by the insurgents they set fire to the temples and images, which spread among the houses, and rendered a great number of the people destitute. However, he thought it best to say no more about it, and without any further remark led the way into Kwa-chow. After making their purchases they returned to the boat, which was unmoored without delay, and sailed up the Yang-tsze Kiang with a favouring breeze. They had not gone far when they "Ah!" said he, "if we could only get these foreigners to join our cause, with their war-ships, sailors, and soldiers, then should we be able to conquer the Manchoo Emperor and his Tartar forces, and restore the ancient Chinese rule over the Taiping Tien Kwo." "I agree with you," responded Meng-kee, "and think it strange that the alliance of the idolatrous Manchoos should be preferred by them to that of the iconoclastic Taipings, who profess the same Christian religion as themselves. This anomalous policy is to me a matter of earnest thought, and I shall make it my study to understand it thoroughly, so that in the event of coming into communication with the foreign authorities, I may be able to argue the question on all its points." "Honourable sir, that is just what I have said to the Kang Wang, my superior in office, when I men |