naval merit. The witty retort of Beatrice to the Messenger, in "Much Ado about Nothing," is of the same kind.

"Mess. I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books. Beat. No: an he were, I would burn my study."

Humour cannot be so well illustrated by quotations as wit, for it is less concentrated, and may pervade the whole of a long narrative. Quotations illustrating the distinction between humour and wit are, indeed, insipid without the context, because in this case the lustre of the gem depends much upon the setting, the flower is delicate, and often withers on transplanting, circumstances of time and place entering largely into the composition both of wit and humour. Painting may be, and often is, humorous, but can never be witty, because wit requires a succession of ideas, and succession is beyond the province of painting. Wit in society is less common than humour, for a humorous impression may be conveyed without effort in the simplest phrases; wit requiring comparison is more farfetched, and demands more thought. Wit is the keener, colder, and more polished quality; humour the more gentle, arch, and amiable, for the subject of humour is man, it is essentially personal; wit treats with the same indifference of persons and things. Of men possessing great wit with little or

no humour, Butler and Byron are among the most remarkable instances; Hudibras is even tiresome from the want of humour. Wit is the more brilliant, humour the more interesting quality. The wit of Cervantes is less prominent than that of Butler, but Don Quixote abounds with humour of both kinds in every page, and this is one of the reasons why it is so much more interesting than Hudibras. There is in humour much of the milk of human kindness; it implies sympathy even with the ridiculous. A bad man may be witty, but can scarcely be humorous.

The subject might be pursued much farther, but, perhaps, enough has been said to point out the distinction. This slight analytical sketch may not be uninteresting to those, who, loving and honouring the works of the great literary artists, like sometimes to turn from the magnificent and brilliant effects to the examination of their tesselated and intertangled causes, and who feel some hesitation even in this mechanical age in agreeing with the profound Bentham, that poetry is as unprofitable as the "jeu d'épingles."

212

OF THE ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN STIRRING

TIMES.

La disunione della plebe e del Senato Romano fece libera e potente quella reppublica.

Machiavelli.

WE hear little in these days of the old pedantic classification of the golden, silver and iron ages of literature. The truism, "omnes aureæ ætatis scriptores non aurei," needs no argument; modern criticism has gone farther, and discovered that even an iron age has its gold. Admitting, however, what it would be vain to deny, that there is a decided superiority in the works, whether of literature, science or art, of some periods over those of others, it does not therefore follow that there was an essential difference in the amount of intellectual power which existed in the world at any two given periods. We see a difference in the results, but that difference may, in part at least, be ascribed to the more or less propitious disposition of circumstances, operating favourably or unfavourably upon individuals, according to the adjustment of their characters thereto; as well as to an excess or diminution of the aggregate of mental endowments parcelled out by

nature at distinct periods among equal masses of mankind. We can certainly trace the influence of circumstances in all human productions: there is no man, however great or original, of whom we can safely say that he would not have been made greater or less by being transplanted out of his own into another age.

Our idea of the force of circumstances grows upon us, when we consider what apparently trivial occurrences often cause an entire change in a man's character and life. Yet, it would be false and dangerous to say that men are therefore absolutely the creatures of circumstances; all who have observed children know that character shews itself from the earliest dawn of intellect, and the different influence of facts, often partially or apparently, but seldom entirely the same, confirms the idiosyncracy of each individual. Every man is in himself a microcosm, not one of a genus, but a species, distinct from all others; nevertheless, the entire amount of mental power distributed among men at various periods may be nearly equal, though susceptible in the distribution of indefinite inequality. It does not follow that different ages are unequal in mental powers, because individuals are.

"I cannot," says Gibbon, "reflect without pleasure on the bounty of nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilised country, in an age of science

and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune." There is a fine spirit in this remark, and yet it is perhaps rather the sentiment of a scholar than of a philosopher, of a man who delighted more in "lettered leisure" than to seek truth through good and evil. Tranquillity is a fine thing, but it may be loved too well. Men whose passions are feebler than their intellects are ungratefully impatient of an age of experiment, forgetting how much they are indebted for their generalisations to the abundant supply of facts, which might perhaps have been wire drawn through centuries, crowded into the space of a few years, and furnished them by the very activity they denounce. The love of tranquillity is in the first instance the result of temperament; bitterness is often superadded from another cause. The man of action, finding it an obvious and agreeable course of proceeding to despise what he does not readily understand, ridicules the pursuits of the contemplative man as frivolous; the latter retorts, not without some show of reason, that the objects of the busy blusterer are at least equally frivolous; but the world is against him, for the world has neither leisure nor capacity to understand his argument. Hence that unphilosophical zeal against the zealous, partly springing from a consciousness of unjust treatment, partly from mortified vanity, sometimes observable