periods. For us, we can't admire one sort of sound hearty vituperation much more than another. There is a decided likeness, for example, between all this talk of vitriol and villany, and the mode and terms adopted by a certain virago, celebrated by De Quincey as affording diversion to Coleridge and his set, to express her contempt of her husband: Junius allowing his public to read the letter, she courting hers through the superscription. Doubtless because her husband had ceased to open her letters, she hit upon the plan of expressing her opinion of him upon the cover, and would address him through the post-office in such periphrases as, "To that supreme of rogues that looks the hang-dog that he is, Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew Bell!" Or, "To that ape of apes, and knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debtbut a small one, you may be sure-in fact, it was 41d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice." An effective hyperbole certainly, as well relished probably by its readers, and inflicting as sharp a sting on its victim, as the more laboured invective which precedes it. There is force in both the stilted and the grotesque. They are provoked by a real need of expression in opposition to the flatter vituperation to which the ears of our own generation are accustomed.

The grotesque in all its branches is made up of hyberbole. Our youth is trained to it in the pantomime, where alone is any deliberate attempt made to

produce the figure visibly and in action; though we may be used enough to undesigned and serious monstrosities of disproportion, typified in the idolatry of that ancient people who worshipped a fly and sacrificed an ox to it; or in the crime of that learned, and amiable as learned, French antiquary, who murdered his best friend to become possessed of a medal, without which his collection was incomplete. It is the inexhaustible resource of the circus, where by no means. the worst hyperboles are to be met with; the figure owing its success, as we see in American humour, to a fine natural vein rather than to a polished cultivation. The wit of the clown introduces a simple audience to intellectual exercises, of which their common life is too bare, and so serves an educational purpose. The mouth he knows, that is wider than from y'ear to y'ear, for it is from here to yonder, is a difficult idea for even a practised intelligence to catch and make its own; but the effort does something, inducting the infant and the rustic into abstractions.

There are sensations and impressions that can only be adequately apprehended by hyperbole, by a bold paradox, which critics of the narrower sort denounce as absurdity. We mean where the thing to be described is a negation, incapable of an active existence, yet to be realised must be imaged as possessing life and action. Dryden was persecuted with perpetual ridicule for his lines

"A horrid stillness first invades the ear,
And in that silence we a tempest fear."

Yet he hits his mark by shooting beyond it. And no imagination can treat of silence so as to convey the idea of it and satisfy the ear's experience of its effect upon the brain without a similar violence to vulgar Thus Wordsworth writes

sense.

"The silent hills and more than silent skies;"

and Sydney Smith of those flashes of silence which made Macaulay's talk so much more agreeable than it had been before they illuminated his eloquence.

We began by commenting on the popular tendency to exaggeration in familiar discourse, the endeavour of our sprightly youth to impart vivacity to their style by the use of a tried and universally popular formula. There we think them on a wrong tack. By all means, we say, let them be forcible, and hyperbolically forcible if they will; but what we have desired, and bring to their notice is, that all hyperbole that really pleases is an immediate effort of the fancy, that there is no common stock of hyperboles with a monopoly to please, and that those who affect them, if they would win credit, must follow Acre's system with his oaths, and strike them off fresh and appropriate to the occasion.

HYMNS OF THE POPULACE.

It is a notorious difficulty for one class to put itself into the position of another, to adopt its tone of feeling, to comprehend its leading motives of action, its distinctive prejudices, prepossessions, and impulses; its likes and dislikes, and those constant pervading influences which form character, and lie at the root of the differences which separate order from order, and keep them at such an impassable distance from real intimacy. High and low, gentlemen and artisans, master and servant, ladies and poor folks, encounter one another at certain points and in particular relations; but the most discerning cannot pretend to see into one another much beyond their point of contact. Employers, clergymen, benevolent visitors, carry their own atmosphere with them wherever they go, and things are seen and coloured through its medium. In their presence mutual interests are discussed from a non-natural point of view. The minds of both parties relax out of a certain tension and artificial condition

when removed from the contact and espionage of an unsympathising witness. This implies no design, no deception of any kind, probably no knowledge of check or impediment to a more perfect understanding. It is only that neither party can display any large or clear picture of themselves where the mind, to be informed, is so ill prepared to receive a comprehensive idea. Hence an inevitable mutual reticence. The superior

must keep back something from the dependant; the most devoted pastor has an easy privacy he does not desire to admit his poorer flock into; the lady does not care that the humble object of her bounty should be able to picture her in the unrestraint of her drawingroom life; and in like manner the labourer, the "hand," the good woman that stands before her kindly visitant garrulously detailing her list of sorrows and grievances, have each an inner world from which it is impossible to lift up the curtain, or let in full daylight, so as to reveal all the motives, interests, notions, pains, and pleasures, which make up an individual and family life so hopelessly different in a thousand points from that unconsciously contrasted with it.

In spite of this difficulty, it is a favourite exercise of fancy to picture the life of classes with which the delineator has none of the knowledge that comes of experience. In depicting the poor, for instance, writers construct scenes of vivid interest. They carefully record provincialisms and grammatical solecisms; they go into detail, coarse, homely, or simple, as it may be, with a marvellous confidence of knowing their ground.