the violence of the Athenian factions, gives two modern illustrations one of the Guelf and Ghibelline parties in Italy; the other-he cites Washington Irving and his book very gravely in Latin-the factions of long pipes and short pipes in New York, under the administration of Peter Stuyvesant. Imagine this erudite and ponderous German poring over Knickerbocker as seriously as over Guicciardini's History of the Italian Republics!

But the genial mind is accessible, at least, to some one or other of the manifold influences which are very inadequately expressed by these two general names, "Wit" and "Humour." They do but describe an inventive energy of genius, which assumes a vast variety of expression, ranging from the most acute intellectual wit, through the many forms of humour, down to frolic drollery and mere fun and the broadest buffoonery. If it be asked what claim to culture this class of faculties has, the first and simplest answer is, that they are amongst the talents with which man is gifted—the gift bringing along with it the necessity and the duty of culture: they are powers which will run riot and run to mischief, unless guided and disciplined. They cannot be destroyed by being disowned. It was a wretched delusion when Stoicism strove to stiffen humanity into stone: and so, in later days, there was like wrong when Puritanism looked black upon natural, innocent, healthful cheerfulness, frighting the joyous temper of a people with a frown, which I believe to this day haunts the race both in Britain and in America, to an extent which is irrational, unchristian, and of course injurious, by abandoning what is festive to the world's keeping, instead of retaining them under better and safer influences. It was Wesley, I believe, who said he had no idea of allowing the devil to monopolize all the good tunes; and it is certain that that same personage (I don't mean Wesley) will be ready enough to furnish to the needs of men holydays of his contriving, if no other provision be made for what is a natural and lawful craving of toiling humanity. There will be, too, a literature of wicked wit to fascinate and poison men, unless that of a truthful and healthful kind be cultivated. It is, I believe, not an uncommon inclination, to disown and to disparage that literature which is an agency of pleasant thoughts; and in opposing to such an opinion a few serious authorities, I hope you will not apprehend an inappropriate relapse into the grave subjects of my last lecture. A great divine, preaching at a time when Puritan rigour was beginning to make itself felt, said, "Fear not thou, that a cheerfulness and alacrity in using God's blessings fear not thou, that a moderate delight in music, in conversation, in recreations, shall be imputed to thee for a fault, for it is conceived by

the Holy Ghost, and is the offspring of a peaceful conscience:" and another who lived to see and to suffer by the new severity, Jeremy Taylor, said, "It is certain that all that which can innocently make a man cheerful, does also make him charitable, for grief, and age, and sickness, and weariness, these are peevish and troublesome; but mirth and cheerfulness are content, and civil, and compliant, and communicative, and love to do good, and to swell up to felicity only upon the wings of charity. If a facete discourse, and an amicable, friendly mirth can refresh the spirit, and take it off from the vile temptation of peevish, despairing, uncomplying melancholy, it must needs be innocent and commendable. And we may as well be refreshed by a clean and brisk discourse, as by the air of Campanian wines; and our faces and our heads may as well be anointed and look pleasant with wit and friendly intercourse, as with the fat of the balsam-tree." A living divine, speaking not professionally, but in that agreeable work, the "Guesses at Truth," has said: "What a dull, plodding, tramping, clanking would the ordinary intercourse of society be, without wit, to enliven and brighten it! When two men meet, they seem to be, as it were, kept at bay through the estranging effects of absence, until some sportive sally opens their hearts to each other. Nor does any thing spread cheerfulness so rapidly over a whole party, or an assembly of people, however large. Reason expands the soul of the philosopher. Imagination glorifies the poet, and breathes a breath of spring through the young and genial; but if we take into account the numberless glances and gleams whereby wit lightens our every-day life, I hardly know what power ministers so bountifully to the innocent pleasures of mankind."

66

Another thoughtful essayist of our day has said, "If ever a people required to be amused, it is we sad-hearted Anglo-Saxons" (the phrase includes us ever-working Americans). Heavy eaters" (rapidity must be substituted for weight for the Anglo-Saxon on this side the ocean), "hard thinkers, often given up to a peculiar melancholy of our own, with a climate that for months together would frown away mirth if it could, many of us with very gloomy thoughts about our hereafter,-if ever there were a people who should avoid increasing their dulness by all work and no play, we are that people. They took their pleasures sadly,' says Froissart, after their fashion.' We need not ask of what

6

nation Froissart was speaking." But let me add, that the blood and temperament of race are not safeguards of contentment, for it is with the most vivacious people, Froissart's countrymen, that the perpetration of suicide is most common.

It is for the thoughful minds that the agency of a cheerful literature is most needed, for remember that it is such minds that are most exposed to the morbid moods, to despondency, to discontent, to some dull depression, more fatal to the energies of the mind, than danger or earnest labour, which nerve the spirit to encounter them. These are intellectual and moral evils, which must be met and mastered by thoughtful self-discipline, and in that discipline, the service of literature may be found, if properly sought for, providing as it does in such varied form, so much of restorative influences. The good will be gained, not so much by seeking it in books especially meant for amusement, as in the culture of a capacity to relish wit and humour, as they are blended with other influences, also intended to give strength and health to the mind. The recreative power of literature will of course be relative to the character and habits of the reader, and happily it is as largely varied as they are, thus suiting their various needs. It is stated by Lord Holland in his "Foreign Reminiscences," that Napoleon, when he had an hour for diversion, not unfrequently employed it in looking over a book of logarithms, which he said was at all seasons of his life a recreation to him. It would be curious, and perhaps not unprofitable, to speculate on such a process of recreation, and trace its relation to the active life which was refreshed by it. The poet Shelley is said to have been extremely fond of mathematics, and every hard, dry science; and I can well conceive that such fondness may be traced to the relief and repose which such subjects brought to one whose imagination soared amid the clouds, and whose moral creed was filled with wild and wondering speculations. Another poet, whose genius had wiser mastery over his imagination, Wordsworth, in the poetic history of his mind, speaking of geometric truths, has said:

"Mighty is the charm

Of those abstractions to a mind beset

With images and haunted by herself;

And specially delightful unto me

Was that clear synthesis built up aloft
So gracefully:"

and the same poet, after describing the agitation of his mind in sharing the excitement and depression of a tumultuous condition of the world, says that he

"Turned to abstract science, and there sought
Work for the reasoning faculty enthroned,

Where the disturbances of space and time,

Whether in matters various, properties

Inherent, or from human will and power
Derived, find no admission."

And, in like manner, we may suppose that it was recreation for Napoleon to turn away from a world in which men by thousands and tens of thousands moved for life and death, by his controlling will, and kingdoms shifted about "like clouds obedient to his breath"--to turn away from such life, and find a brief and happy seclusion in the tranquil and enduring truths of abstract science. It may be, too, that the book of logarithms brought with it memories of early days, before he began to bear the giant burden of Europe's fortunes, and thus carried him away to breathe in spirit the clear atmosphere of studious boyhood.

I have spoken of this case to show how various and relative a thing is recreation, as the game of chess is amusement to some minds, while others shrink from it, as Sir Walter Scott says he did, as from a toil and a waste of brains. Charles Lamb describes the old lady who went so earnestly into her game of whist, that "she could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in the light of unbending the mind after serious studies in recreation. She unbent her mind afterwards, over a book. In like manner, with regard to books, their recreative character is greatly modified by the disposition of the recipient. Mr. Dickens has somewhere a story of a sombre-spirited sentimentalist, who pronounced Milton's "L'Allegro" his worst performance, and complained of "Gray's Elegy" as too light and frivolous.

If the case of Napoleon show a peculiar recreation congenial to a spirit of the most intense energy, literary history tells us of such a case as that of Cowper, where the hauntings of melancholy were allayed by sportive invention. His biographer tells us, that "For a while Lady Austen's conversation had as happy an effect upon the melancholy spirit of Cowper as the harp of David upon Saul. Whenever the cloud seemed to be coming over him, her sprightly powers were exerted to dispel it. One afternoon, when he appeared more than usually depressed, she told him the story of John Gilpin, which had been told to her in her childhood, and which, in her relation, tickled his fancy as much as it has that of thousands and tens of thousands since in his. The next morning, he said to her that he had been kept awake during the greater part of the night by thinking of the story and laughing at it, and that he had turned it into a ballad. The ballad was sent to Mr. Unwin, who said in reply that it had made him laugh tears. Cowper himself said in one of his letters: 'If I trifle, and merely trifle, it is because I am reduced to it by necessity; a melancholy, that nothing else so effectually disperses, engages me sometimes in the arduous task of

being merry by force. And, strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all.””

But it is not only for their recreative agency that the faculties of wit and humour are to be considered; they are also to be regarded as elements of genius, as entering into the constitution of the highest order of the human mind. I do not, of course, mean that every man eminent in the world of letters or of action is a wit or a humourist; but that there is abundant proof, either in acts or written words, of the presence of these faculties, made more or less manifest, according to the tenor of the life or the subject of the writings, and not unfrequently breaking forth through adverse circumstances of life or unpropitious topics of books. When Dr. Arnold is describing the great Carthaginian hero putting on a variety of disguises to baffle the attempts of assassins, he says: Hanibal "wore false hair, appearing sometimes as a man of mature years, and sometimes with the grey hair of old age; and if he had that taste for humour which great men are seldom without, and which some anecdotes of him imply, he must have been often amused by the mistakes thus occasioned, and have derived entertainment from that which policy or necessity dictated." A thoughtful and eloquent defender of Luther, in excusing the plainness, and even coarseness, of expression for which he has been reproached, says, “he could not mince his words, or take thought about suiting them to fastidious ears, even if there had been such to suit them to; and the humour with which he was so richly gifted, and which is the natural associate of an intense love of truth, if it be not rather a particular form and manifestation of that love, led him to strip off the artificial drapery and conventional formalities of life, and to look straight at the realities hidden beneath them in their naked contrasts and contradictions." I quote the passage simply as an authority for considering humour as a "natural associate of an intense love of truth, perhaps rather a particular form and manifestation of that love," and thus explaining, at least in part, how it enters into the constitution of genius. Observe, too, that it is the strongest and most capacious mind which will perceive most keenly and feel most deeply the manifold and perpetually occurring contradictions, and incongruities, and inconsistencies of life, the slight steppings down from the sublime to the ridiculous, the quaint contact of the comic and the solemn, provoking the laugh at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and all the strange combinations which grow out of man's mingled nature of strength and weakness, which a thoughtful mind observes in others, and is vet more deeply conscious of it in itself. These things