entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient, in order that the materials may turn to as fine account as possible; though our clay, in the course of ages and experience, may be refined more and more. We may get rid of the worst earth, though not of earth itself.

Now the liability to the loss of childrenor rather what renders us sensible of it, the occasional loss itself-seems to be one of these necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. We do not mean that everybody must lose one of his children in order to enjoy the rest; or that every individual loss afflicts us in the same proportion. We allude to the deaths of infants in general. These might be as few as we could render them. But if none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily be conceived, what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbours with the same idea.* The other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes, They are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination. Lastly, "of these are the kingdom of heaven." Wherever there is a province of that benevolent and allaccessible empire, whether on earth or else where, such are the gentle spirits that must inhabit it. To such simplicity, or the resemblance of it, must they come. Such must be the ready confidence of their hearts, and creativeness of their fancy. And so ignorant must they be of the "knowledge of good and evil," losing their discernment of that self-created trouble by enjoying the garden before them, and not being ashamed of what is kindly and innocent.

TO ANY ONE WHOM BAD WEATHER DEPRESSES.

If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find upon a little inquiry that others have been

* "I sighed," says old Captain Bolton, "when I envied you the two bonnie children, but I sigh not now to call either the monk or the soldier mine own." -Monastery, vol. iii., p. 341.

melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now. If you have been melancholy many times, recollect that you have got over all those times : and try if you cannot find out new means of getting over them better.

Do not imagine that mind alone is concerned in your bad spirits. The body has a great deal to do with these matters. The mind may undoubtedly affect the body; but the body also affects the mind. There is a mutual reaction between them; and by lessening it on either side, you diminish the pain on both.

If you are melancholy, and know not why, be assured it must arise entirely from some physical weakness; and do your best to strengthen yourself. The blood of a melancholy man is thick and slow. The blood of a lively man is clear and quick. Endeavour, therefore, to put your blood in motion. Exercise is the best way to do it; but you may also help yourself, in moderation, with wine, or other excitements. Only you must take care so to proportion the use of any artificial stimulus, that it may not render the blood languid by over-exciting it at first; and that you may be able to keep up, by the natural stimulus only, the help you have given yourself by the artificial.

Regard the bad weather as somebody has advised us to handle the nettle. In proportion as you are delicate with it, it will make you feel; but

"Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And the rogue obeys you well."

Do not the less, however, on that account, take all reasonable precaution and arms against it,your boots, etc., against wet feet, and your great-coat or umbrella against the rain. It is timidity and flight which are to be deprecated, not proper armour for the battle. The first will lay you open to defeat on the least attack. A proper use of the latter will only keep you strong for it. Plato had such a high opinion of exercise that he said it was a cure even for a wounded conscience. Nor is this opinion a dangerous one. For there is no system, even of superstition, however severe or cruel in other matters, that does not allow a wounded conscience to be curable by some means. Nature will work out its rights and its kindness some way or other, through the worst sophistications; and this is one of the instances in which she seems to raise herself above all contingencies. The conscience may have been wounded by artificial or by real guilt; but then she will tell it in those extremities that even the real guilt may have been produced by circumstances. It is her kindness alone which nothing can pull down from its predominance.

See fair play between cares and pastimes. Diminish your mere wants as much as possible, whether you are rich or poor; for the rich man's wants, increasing by indulgence, are apt to out.

weigh even the abundance of his means; and the poor man's diminution of them renders his means the greater. Do not want money, for instance, for money's sake. There is excitement in the pursuit; but it is dashed with more troubles than most others, and gets less happiness at last. On the other hand, increase all your natural and healthy enjoyments. Cultivate your afternoon fireside, the society of your friends, the company of agreeable children, music, theatres, amusing books, an urbane and generous gallantry. He who thinks any innocent pastime foolish, has either yet to grow wiser, or is past it. In the one case, his notion of being childish is itself a childish notion. In the other, his importance is of so feeble and hollow a cast, that it dare not move for fear of tumbling to pieces.

A friend of ours, who knows as well as any man how to unite industry with enjoyment, has set an excellent example to those who can afford the leisure, by taking two Sabbaths every week instead of one-not Methodistical Sabbaths, but days of rest which pay true homage to the Supreme Being by enjoying His creation. He will be gratified at reading this paragraph on his second Sunday morning [Wednesday].

One of the best pieces of advice for an ailing spirit is to go to no sudden extremes-to adopt no great and extreme changes in diet or other habits. They may make a man look very great and philosophic to his own mind, but they are not fit for a nature to which custom has been truly said to be a second nature. Dr Cheyne (as we remember reading on a stall) may tell us that a drowning man cannot too quickly get himself out of the water; but the analogy is not good. If the water has become a second habit, he might almost as well say that a fish could not get too quickly out of it.

Upon this point Bacon says that we should discontinue what we think hurtful by little and little. And he quotes with admiration the advice of Celsus, that "a man do vary and interchange contraries, but with an inclination to the more benign extreme." "Use fasting," he says, "and full eating, but rather full eating; watching and sleep, but rather sleep; sitting and exercise, but rather exercise; and the like. So shall nature be cherished, and yet taught masteries."

We cannot do better than conclude with one or two other passages out of the same essay, full of his usual calm wisdom. "If you fly physic in health altogether, it will be too strange for your body when you need it." (He means that a general state of health should not make us over-confident and contemptuous of physic, but that we should use it moderately if required, that it may not be too strange to us when required most.) "If you make it too familiar, it will have no extraordinary effect when sickness

"Of Regimen of Health," Bacon's Essays, p. 26.

cometh. I commend rather some diet for certain seasons, than frequent use of physic, except it be grown into a custom, for those diets alter the body more, and trouble it less."

"As for the passions and studies of the mind," says he, “avoid envy, anxious fears, anger, fretting inwards, subtle and knotty inquisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, sadness not communicated" (for, as he says finely somewhere else, they who keep their griefs to themselves, are "cannibals of their own hearts"). "Entertain hopes; mirth, rather than joy" (that is to say, cheerfulness rather than what we call boisterous merriment); "variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature."

ON THE TALKING OF NONSENSE.

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense. Nonsense, in the bad sense of the word, like certain suspicious ladies, is very fond of bestowing its own appellation, particularly upon what renders other persons agreeable. But nonsense, in the good sense of the word, is a very sensible thing in its season; and is only confounded with the other by people of a shallow gravity, who cannot afford to joke.

These gentlemen live upon credit, and would not have it inquired into. They are perpetual beggars of the question. They are grave, not because they think, or feel the contrast of mirth, for then they would feel the mirth itself; but because gravity is their safest mode of behaviour. They must keep their minds sitting still, because they are incapable of a motion that is not awkward. They are waxen images among the living; the deception is undone if the others stir; or hollow vessels covered up, which may be taken for full ones; the collision of wit jars against them, and strikes but their hollowness.

In fact, the difference between nonsense not worth talking, and nonsense worth it, is simply this the former is the result of a want of ideas, the latter of a superabundance of them. This is remarkably exemplified by Swift's "Polite Conversation," in which the dialogue, though intended to be a tissue of the greatest nonsense in request with shallow merriment, is in reality full of ideas, and many of them very humorous; but then they are all commonplace, and have been said so often, that the thing uppermost in your mind is the inability of the speakers to utter a sentence of their own ;-they have no ideas at all. Many of the jokes and similes in that treatise are still the current coin of the shallow; though they are now pretty much confined to gossips of an inferior order, and the upper part of the lower classes.

On the other hand, the wildest rattling, as it is called, in which men of sense find entertainment, consists of nothing but a quick and original succession of ideas-a finding, as it were, of something in nothing-a rapid turning of the hearer's mind to some new face of thought and sparkling imagery. The man of shallow gravity, besides an uneasy half-consciousness that he has nothing of the sort about him, is too dull of perception to see the delicate links between one thought and another; and he takes that for a mere chaos of laughing jargon, in which finer apprehensions perceive as much delightful association as men of musical taste do in the most tricksome harmonies and accompaniments of Mozart or Beethoven. Between such gravity and such mirth there is as much difference as between the driest and dreariest psalmody, and that exquisite laughing trio, "E voi ridete," which is sung in "Così fan tutte." A Quaker's coat and a garden are not more dissimilar; nor a death-bell and the birds after a sunny shower. It is on such occasions, indeed, that we enjoy the perfection of what is agreeable in humanity, -the harmony of mind and body-intellect, and animal spirits. Accordingly, the greatest geniuses appear to have been proficients in this kind of nonsense, and to have delighted in dwelling upon it, and attributing it to their favourites. Virgil is no joker, but Homer is; and there is the same difference between their heroes, Eneas and Achilles, the latter of whom is also a player on the harp. Venus, the most delightful of the goddesses, is Philommeides, the laughter-loving-an epithet, by the by, which might give a good hint to a number of very respectable ladies, "who love their lords," but are too apt to let ladies less respectable run away with them. Horace represents Pleasantry as fluttering about Venus in company with Cupid:

"Quem Jocus circumvolat, et Cupido;"

gravest, but not the shallowest, of philosophers, gave him the title of the Wise. The disciple of Socrates appears also to have been a great enjoyer of Aristophanes; and the divine Socrates himself was a wit and a joker.

But the divine Shakespeare-the man to whom we go for everything, and are sure to find it, grave, melancholy, or merry-what said he to this exquisite kind of nonsense? Perhaps next to his passion for detecting nature, and overinforming it with poetry, he took delight in pursuing a joke; and the lowest scenes of his in this way say more to men whose faculties are fresh about them, and who prefer enjoyment to criticism, than the most doting of commentators can find out. They are instances of his animal spirits, of his sociality, of his passion for giving and receiving pleasure, of his enjoyment of something wiser than wisdom.

The greatest favourites of Shakespeare are made to resemble himself in this particular. Hamlet, Mercutio, Touchstone, Jaques, Richard the Third, and Falstaff, "inimitable Falstaff," are all men of wit and humour, modified according to their different temperaments or circumstances; some from health and spirits, others from sociality, others from a contrast with their very melancholy. Indeed, melancholy itself, with the profoundest intellects, will rarely be found to be anything else than a sickly temperament, induced or otherwise, preying in its turn upon the disappointed expectation of plea sure; upon the contradiction of hopes, which this world is not made to realise, though, let us never forget, it is made, as they themselves prove, to suggest. Some of Shakespeare's characters, as Mercutio and Benedick, are almost entirely made up of wit and animal spirits; and delightful fellows they are, and ready, from their very taste, to perform the most serious and manly offices. Most of his women, too, have an abundance of natural vivacity. Desdemona herself is so pleasant of intercourse in every way, that,

It may be thought a begging of the question to mention Anacreon, since he made an absolute business of mirth and enjoyment, and sat down systematically to laugh as well as to drink. But on that very account, perhaps, his case is still more in point; and Plato, one of the

above mentioned, the Moor, when he grows jealous, is tempted to think it a proof of her want of honesty. But we must make Shakespeare speak for himself, or we shall not know how to be silent on this subject. What a description is that which he gives of a man of mirth of a mirth, too, which he has expressly stated to be within the limit of what is becom ing! It is in "Love's Labour's Lost:" "A merrier man, Within the limit of becoming mirth, I never spent an hour's talk withal. His eye begets occasion for his wit: For every object that the one doth catch, The other turns to a mirth-moving jest: Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor, Delivers in such apt and gracious words, That aged ears play truant at his tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished; So sweet and voluble in his discourse."