"It never rains but it pours," is the pat proverb of all the world to express its belief in the inevitableness and omnipotence of extremes. Carlyle has enlarged upon it significantly, in that famous passage in which he likens men collectively to sheep. Like sheep, he says, are we seen ever running in torrents and mobs, if we ever run at all. "Neither know we, except by blind habit, where the good pastures lie: solely when the sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, and chew it; also when the grass is bitter and scant, we know it,—and bleat and butt: these last two facts we know of a truth, and in very deed. Thus do men and sheep play their parts on this nether earth; wandering restlessly in large masses, they know not whither; for most part, each following his neighbor, and his own nose. Nevertheless, not always; look better, you shall find certain that do, in some small degree, know whither. Sheep have their bell-wether, some ram of the folds, endued with more valor, with clearer vision than other sheep; he leads them through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the woods and water-courses, for covert or for pleasant provender; courageously marching, and if need be leaping, and with hoof and horn doing battle, in the van: him they courageously, and with assured heart, follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman will inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness these woolly hosts adhere to their wether; and rush after him, through good report and through bad report, were it into safe shelters and green thymy nooks, or into asphaltic lakes and the jaws of devouring lions. Even also must we recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul's quick eye: 'If you hold a stick before the wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw your stick, the flock will nevertheless all leap as he did; and the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously vaulting over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier.'"

Society is always swaying backward and forward—vibrating, like the pendulum, from one extreme to another; for a moment only, now and then, is it upright, and governed by reason. Moderation is hateful to it. There is a pretty passage in one of Lucian's dialogues, where Jupiter complains to Cupid that, though he has had so many intrigues, he was never sincerely beloved. In order to be loved, says Cupid, you must lay aside your Ægis and your thunder-bolts, and you must curl and perfume your hair, and place a garland on your head, and walk with a soft step, and assume a winning, obsequious deportment. But, replied Jupiter, I am not willing to resign so much of my dignity. Then, replied Cupid, leave off desiring to be loved. He wanted to be Jupiter and Adonis at the same time. "It is natural," says Brackenridge, in Modern Chivalry, "to distrust him who proposes to stop short of what seems a complete reform. We are right, say the people. You are right, says the man of prudence. We were wrong, say the people. You were wrong, says the same man." The majority rules. In the grove of Gotama lived a Brahman, who, having bought a sheep in another village, and carrying it home on his shoulder to sacrifice, was seen by three rogues, who resolved to take the animal from him by the following stratagem: Having separated, they agreed to encounter the Brahman on his road as if coming from different parts. One of them cried out, "O Brahman! why dost thou carry that dog on thy shoulder?" "It is not a dog," replied the Brahman; "it is a sheep for sacrifice." As he went on, the second knave met him, and put the same question; whereupon the Brahman, throwing the sheep on the ground, looked at it again and again. Having replaced it on his shoulder, the good man went with mind wavering like a string. But when the third rogue met him and said, "Father, where art thou taking that dog?" the Brahman, believing his eyes bewitched, threw down the sheep and hurried home, leaving the thieves to feast on that which he had provided for the gods.

The world grows tired of admiring, and delights to limit its admiration. "Garrick," said Hazlitt, "kept up the fever of public admiration as long as anybody, but when he returned to the stage after a short absence no one went to see him." "The old Earl of Norwich, who," said Sir William Temple, "was esteemed the greatest wit in Charles the First's reign, when Charles the Second came to the throne was thought nothing of." Happy if the world's favorite to-day be not its victim to-morrow. Traveling through Switzerland, Napoleon was greeted with such enthusiasm that Bourrienne said to him, "It must be delightful to be greeted with such demonstrations of enthusiastic admiration." "Bah!" replied Napoleon, "this same unthinking crowd, under a slight change of circumstances, would follow me just as eagerly to the scaffold." "I have," said an eminent American general to Baron de HÜbner, "the greatest horror of popular demonstrations. These very men who deafen you with their cheers to-day are capable of throwing stones and mud at you to-morrow." Mirabeau, on a famous occasion, amid the threatening clamors of an angry crowd, said, "A few days ago I too was to be carried in triumph, and now they are bawling through the streets, 'the great treason of the Count of Mirabeau.' This lesson was not necessary to remind me that the distance is short between the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock." "What throngs! what acclamations," exclaimed the flatterers of Cromwell, when he was proclaimed Protector of the Commonwealth of England. Cromwell replied, "There would be still more, if they were going to hang me." The multitudes that went before and that followed Christ into Jerusalem, crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest," "cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? and they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him." Madame Roland wrote from her prison-cell to Robespierre, "It is not, Robespierre, to excite your compassion, that I present you with a picture less melancholy than the truth. I am above asking your pity; and were it offered, I should perhaps deem it an insult. I write for your instruction. Fortune is fickle; and popular power is liable to change." "Society," said Macaulay, writing of Byron, "capricious in its indignation, as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshiped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury." Junius, in the celebrated letter, warns the king that "while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, he should remember that, as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another." The Jews, said Luther, have a story of a king of Bashan, whom they call Og; they say he had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, but God made a hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant's neck, and he could never rid himself of it.

Causes of good or evil seem to accumulate, when a very slight thing is the beginning of a succession of blessings or curses. All things conspire, till the recipients of blessings are smothered, or the victims of curses are crushed. Till the cup is full, overflowing; till the burden is unbearable, merciless; till good becomes satiety, or evil cruelty, all the world seems to delight in contributing or robbing, deifying or anathematizing.

"What a noise out-of-doors!" exclaimed Souvestre's Philosopher from his attic in Paris. "What is the meaning of all these shouts and cries? Ah! I recollect: this is the last day of the carnival, and the maskers are passing. Christianity has not been able to abolish the noisy bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names. That which it has given to these 'days of liberty' announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; 'carn-a-val' means literally 'down with flesh meat!' It is a forty days' farewell to the 'blessed pullets and fat hams,' so celebrated by Pantagruel's minstrel. Man prepares for privation by satiety, and finishes his sins thoroughly before he begins to repent. Why, in all ages and among every people, do we meet with some one of these mad festivals? Must we believe that it requires such an effort for men to be reasonable, that the weaker ones have need of rest at intervals. The monks of La Trappe, who are condemned to silence by their rule, are allowed to speak once in a month, and on this day, they all talk at once from the rising to the setting of the sun."

It is reported of Scaramouche, the first famous Italian comedian, that being in Paris, and in great want, he bethought himself of constantly plying near the door of a noted perfumer in that city, and when any one came out who had been buying snuff, never failed to desire a taste of them: when he had by this means got together a quantity made up of several different sorts, he sold it again at a lower rate to the same perfumer, who, finding out the trick, called it "snuff of a thousand flowers." The story further tells us that by this means he got a very comfortable subsistence, until, making too great haste to grow rich, he one day took such an unreasonable pinch out of the box of a Swiss officer as engaged him in a quarrel, and obliged him to quit this ingenious way of life.

"I remember," says Cumberland, in his Memoirs, "the predicament of an ingenious mechanic and artist, who, when Rich the harlequin was the great dramatic author of his time, and wrote successfully for the stage, contrived and executed a most delicious serpent for one of those inimitable productions, in which Mr. Rich, justly disdaining the weak aid of language, had selected the classical fable, if I rightly recollect, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and, having conceived a very capital part for the serpent, was justly anxious to provide himself with a performer who could support a character of that consequence with credit to himself and his author. The event answered his most ardent hopes: nothing could be more perfect than his entrances and exits; nothing ever crawled across the stage with more accomplished sinuosity than this enchanting serpent; every one was charmed with its performance; it twirled and twisted, and wriggled itself about in so divine a manner, that the whole world was ravished by the lovely snake; nobles and non-nobles, rich and poor, old and young, reps and demi-reps, flocked to see it and admire it. The artist, who had been the master of the movement, was intoxicated with his success; he turned his hand and head to nothing else but serpents; he made them of all sizes; they crawled about his shop as if he had been chief snake-catcher to the furies; the public curiosity was satisfied with one serpent, and he had nests of them yet unsold; his stock lay dead upon his hands, his trade was lost, and the man was ruined, bankrupt, and undone."

Lecky observes that when, after long years of obstinate disbelief, the reality of the great discovery of Harvey dawned upon the medical world, the first result was a school of medicine which regarded man simply as an hydraulic machine, and found the principle of every malady in imperfections of circulation.

In the Arctic region, says Dr. Kane, the frost is so intense as to burn. Sudden putrefaction of meat takes place at a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero. The Greenlanders consider extreme cold as favorable to putrefaction. The Esquimaux withdraw the viscera immediately after death, and fill the cavity with stones. Dr. Kane was told that the musk ox is sometimes tainted after five minutes exposure to great cold. In Italy, south of the great alluvial plain of Lombardy, and away from the immediate sea-coast, the lakes occupy the craters of extinguished volcanoes. In Arabia, travelers declare, the silence of the desert is so profound that it soon ceases to be soothing or solemn, and becomes absolutely painful, if not appalling. In Java, that magnificent and fearful clime, the most lovely flowers are found to conceal hidden reptiles; the most tempting fruits are tinctured with subtle poisons; there grow those splendid trees whose shadow is death; there the vampire, an enormous bat, sucks the blood of the victims whose sleep he prolongs, by wafting over them an air full of freshness and perfume. Darwin, in his Voyage, speaks of the strange mixture of sound and silence which pervades the shady parts of the wood on the shore of Brazil. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. At Syracuse, an English gentleman was taken to a dirty cistern; seventy women were washing, with their clothes tucked up, and themselves standing in a pool,—a disgusting scene. "What do you bring me here for?" said he to the guide. "Why, sir, this is the Fountain of Arethusa." In the Fourth Circle of Dante's Hell are the souls of the Prodigal and the Avaricious: they are forever rolling great weights, and forever smiting each other. "To all eternity," says the poet, "they shall continue butting one another." A dung-hill at a distance, said Coleridge, sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. Scargill declared that an Englishman is never happy but when he is miserable; a Scotchman is never at home but when he is abroad; an Irishman is at peace only when he is fighting. The melancholy, says Horace, hate the merry, the jocose the melancholy; the volatile dislike the sedate, the indolent the stirring and vivacious; the modest man generally carries the look of a churl. Meyer, in conversation with Goethe, said he saw a shoemaker in Italy who hammered his leather upon the antique marble head of a Roman emperor. The lark, that sings out of the sky, purifies himself, like the pious Mussulman, in the dust of the ground. The nightingale, they say, sings with his breast against a thorn. The fragrant white pond lily springs from the same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. An elephant, that no quadruped has the temerity to attack, is said to be the favorite victim of a worm that bores into his foot and slowly tortures him to death. A gnat, according to a tradition of the Arabs, overcame the mighty Nimrod. Enraged at the destruction of his gods by the prophet Abraham, he sought to slay him, and waged war against him. But the prophet prayed to God, and said, "Deliver me, O God, from this man, who worships stones, and boasts himself to be the lord of all beings;" and God said to him, "How shall I punish him?" And the prophet answered, "To Thee armies are as nothing, and the strength and power of men likewise. Before the smallest of thy creatures will they perish." And God was pleased at the faith of the prophet, and he sent a gnat, which vexed Nimrod night and day, so that he built a room of glass in his palace, that he might dwell therein, and shut out the insect. But the gnat entered also, and passed by his ear into his brain, upon which it fed, and increased in size day by day, so that the servants of Nimrod beat his head with a hammer continually, that he might have some ease from his pain; but he died, after suffering these torments for four hundred years.

"The grandiose statues of Michel Angelo," said a traveler, descanting upon the art and architecture of old Rome, "appear to the greatest advantage under the bold arches of Bramante. There—between those broad lines, under those prodigious curves—placed in one of those courts, or near one of the great temples where the perspective is incomplete—the statues of Michel Angelo display their tragic attitudes, their gigantic members, which seem animated by a ray from the divinity, and struggling to mount from earth to heaven. Bramante and Michel Angelo detested but completed each other. Thus it is often in human nature. Those two men knew not that they were laborers in the same work. And history is silent upon such points till death has passed over her heroes. Armies have fought until they have been almost annihilated on the field of battle; men have hated and injured one another by their calumnies; the learned and powerful persecute and seek to blot their fellows from the earth, as if there was not air and space for all; they know not, blinded by their passions, and warped by the prejudices of envy, that the future will blend them in the same glory, that to posterity they will represent but one sentiment. Bramante and Michel Angelo, enemies during life, are reconciled in immortality."

See how the extremes in morals and legislation met during the few years of English history covering the Protectorate and the Restoration. Puritanism and liberty of conscience, whose exponents were Cromwell and Milton, met licentiousness and corrupted loyalty, with Charles II. and Wycherley for representatives. Cromwell was "Puritanism armed and in power;" Milton was its apostle and poet. Charles II. was kingcraft besotted; Wycherley its jester and pimp. Cromwell—farmer, preacher, soldier, party leader, prince—radical, stern, hopeful; Charles—debauchee, persecuting skeptic, faithless ruler; Milton—lofty in his Paradise; Wycherley—nasty in his Love in a Wood, and Country Wife. "A larger soul never dwelt in a house of clay," said one who had been much about Cromwell, after his death, when flattery was mute. "Old Goat" was the name given to Charles by one who knew him best. Cromwell, "after all his battles and storms, and all the plots of assassins against his life, died of grief at the loss of his favorite daughter, and of watching at her side." Charles went out of life in a fit, the result of his horrible excesses, if not of poison,—as said and believed by many, administered by one of his own numerous mistresses.

First, "the Puritans," says Macaulay, "interdicted, under heavy penalties, the use of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, but in private houses. It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as painting. Nymphs and graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent. Against the lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered by humanity or by common-sense. Public amusements, from the masks which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously attacked. One ordinance directed that all the May-poles in England should forthwith be hewn down. One of the first resolutions adopted by Barebone's Parliament was that no person should be admitted into the public service till the house should be satisfied with his real godliness."

Suddenly the wheel turned. "The same people who, by a solemn objurgation, had excluded even the posterity of their lawful sovereign, exhausted themselves in festivals and rejoicings for his return." Restored royalty "made it a crime to attend a dissenting place of worship. A single justice of the peace might convict without a jury, and might, for a third offense, pass sentence of transportation beyond the sea, or for seven years. The whole soul of the restored church was in the work of crushing the Puritans, and of teaching her disciples to give unto CÆsar the things which were CÆsar's. She had been pillaged and oppressed by the party which preached an austere morality. She had been restored to opulence and honor by libertines. Little as the men of mirth and fashion were disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts, they were yet ready to fight knee-deep in blood for her cathedrals and palaces, for every line of her rubric and every thread of her vestments. If the debauched cavalier haunted brothels and gambling-houses, he at least avoided conventicles. If he ever spoke without uttering ribaldry and blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe to jail for preaching and praying. The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of the head of the church, publicly recited by female lips in female ears, while the author of the Pilgrim's Progress languished in a dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor. Then came those days never to be recalled without a blush—the days of servitude without loyalty, and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the manners of a government which had just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the face of the earth, and be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations."

The morality of the court was exhibited in the character of the sovereign, according to whose ethics "every person was to be bought; but some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skillful, it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever men kept up the price of their abilities was called integrity. The chief trick by which handsome women kept up the price of their beauty was called modesty. The love of God, the love of country, the love of family, the love of friends, were phrases of the same sort, delicate and convenient synonyms for the love of self."

A great licentiousness, says Emerson, treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?" "The courtiers of Charles II. were very dissolute because the Puritans were too strict; Addison and Steele were respectable because Congreve and Wycherley were licentious; Wesley was zealous because the church had become indifferent; the revolution of 1789 was a reaction against the manners of the last century, and the revolution in running its course set up a reaction against itself." "The drawing a certain positive line in morals," says Hazlitt, "beyond which a single false step is irretrievable, makes virtue formal, and vice desperate." "Puritanism," says Taine, "had brought on an orgie, and fanatics had talked down the virtues."

"To what a place you come in search of knowledge!" exclaimed a bitter republican to Castelar, in the streets of Rome, during the reign of the pope, not long before Victor Emanuel. "Here everybody is interested about lottery tickets; no one for an idea of the human brain. The commemoration of the anniversary of Shakespeare has been prohibited in this city of the arts. Her censorship is so wise that when a certain writer wished to publish a book on the discoveries of Volta, she let loose on him the thunders of the Index, thinking it treated of Voltairianism—a philosophy which leaves neither repose nor digestion to our cardinals. On the other hand, a cabalistic and astrological book, professing to divine the caprices of the lottery, has been printed and published under the pontifical seal, as containing nothing contrary to religion, morals, or sovereign authority. Rabelais knew this city—Rabelais. On arriving, in place of writing a dissertation on dogmas, he penned one on lettuces, the only good and fresh articles in this cursed dungeon. And priest though he was, a priest of the sixteenth century, more religious than our generation, he had a long correspondence with the pious Bishop of Maillezais on the children of the pope; for the reverend prelate had especially charged him to ascertain whether the Cavaliere Pietro Luis Farnese was the lawful or illegitimate son of his holiness. Believe me, Rabelais knew Rome."

An old letter-writer, inditing from Paris, said, "Nakedness is so innocent here! In a refined city, one gets back to the first chapter of Genesis; the extremes meet, and Paradise and Paris get together."

What opposite characters were the leaders in the Reformation. The monks said the egg was laid by Erasmus, hatched by Luther. "On the other hand," says Motley, "he was reviled for not taking side manfully with the reformer. The moderate man received much denunciation from zealots on either side. He soon clears himself, however, from all suspicions of Lutheranism. He is appalled by the fierce conflict which rages far and wide. He becomes querulous as the mighty besom sweeps away sacred dust and consecrated cobwebs. 'Men should not attempt everything at once,' he writes, 'but rather step by step. That which men cannot approve they must look at through the fingers. If the godlessness of mankind requires such fierce physicians as Luther, if man cannot be healed with soothing ointments and cooling drinks, let us hope that God will comfort, as repentant, those whom he has punished as rebellious. If the dove of Christ—not the owl of Minerva—would only fly to us, some measure might be put to the madness of mankind.' Meantime, the man whose talk is not of doves and owls, the fierce physician, who deals not with ointments and cooling draughts, strides past the crowd of gentle quacks to smite the foul disease. Devils, thicker than tiles on house-tops, scare him not from his work. Bans and bulls, excommunications and decrees, are rained upon his head. The paternal emperor sends down dire edicts, thicker than hail upon the earth. The Holy Father blasts and raves from Rome. Louvain doctors denounce, Louvain hangmen burn, the bitter, blasphemous books. The immoderate man stands firm in the storm, demanding argument instead of illogical thunder; shows the hangmen and the people, too, outside the Elster gate at Wittenberg, that papal bulls will blaze as merrily as heretic scrolls."

Erasmus was a philosophical thinker; Luther a bold actor. The former would reform by the slow processes of education; the latter by revolution. "Without Erasmus," says Froude, "Luther would have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded—so much of him as deserved to succeed—in Luther's victory." Erasmus said, "There is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning, thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into the halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than the justest war." Luther said, "I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the things of God it laughs at them." "Whenever I pray," he said, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus."

Melancthon was as different from Luther as Erasmus. He was the theologian of the three,—so much so that the scholars were all jealous of him. Sir Thomas More wrote to Erasmus that Tyndale had seen Melancthon in Paris; that Tyndale was afraid "if France should receive the word of God by him, it would be confirmed in the faith of the Eucharist contrary to the sect of the Wickliffites." "I have been born," said Luther, "to war and fight with factions and devils, therefore my books are stormy and warlike. I must root out the stumps and stocks, cut away the thorns and hedges, fill up the ditches, and am the rough forester, to break a path and make things ready. But master Philip walks gently and silently, tills and plants, sows and waters with pleasure, as God has gifted him richly." When Melancthon arose to preach on one occasion, he took this for a text: "I am the good shepherd." In looking round upon his numerous and respectable audience, his natural timidity entirely overcame him, and he could only repeat the text over and over again. Luther, who was in the pulpit with him, at length impatiently exclaimed, "You are a very good sheep!" and telling him to sit down, took the same text, and preached an excellent discourse from it.

Coming down to later times, and to characters more purely literary, what could more beautifully illustrate the harmony of opposites, so often observable in literature and life, than the intimacy which existed between Professor Wilson and Dr. Blair? The course and habit of Dr. Blair's life "were like the smooth, deep water; serene, undisturbed to outer eye; and the very repose that was about him had a charm for the restless, active energy of his friend, who turned to this gentle and meek nature for mental rest. I have often seen them sitting together," says Mrs. Gordon, "in the quiet retirement of the study, perfectly absorbed in each other's presence, like school-boys in the abandonment of their love for each other, occupying one seat between them, my father, with his arm lovingly embracing 'the dear doctor's' shoulders, playfully pulling the somewhat silvered locks to draw his attention to something in the tome spread out on their knees, from which they were both reading. Such discussions as they had together hour upon hour! Shakespeare, Milton—always the loftiest themes—never weary in doing honor to the great souls from whom they had learnt so much. Their voices were different, too: Dr. Blair's soft and sweet as that of a woman; the professor's sonorous, sad, with a nervous tremor: each revealing the peculiar character of the man."

Godwin and Rough (to whom some of Lamb's most amusing letters were written) met at a dinner-party for the first time. The very next day, it is stated, Godwin called on a friend (a fellow-guest) to say how much he liked Rough, adding: "By the way, do you think he would lend me fifty pounds just now, as I am in want of a little money?" He had not left his friend an hour before Rough came with a like question. He wanted a bill discounted, and asked whether his friend thought Godwin would do it for him. The habit of both was so well known that some persons were afraid to invite them, lest it should lead to an application for a loan from some acquaintance who chanced to be present.

Northcote mentioned to Hazlitt an instance of some young country people who had to sleep on the floor in the same room, and they parted the men from the women by some sacks of corn, which served for a line of demarcation and an inviolable partition between them. Hazlitt spoke of a countrywoman, who, coming to an inn in the west of England, wanted a bed; and being told they had none to spare, still persisted, till the landlady said in a joke, "I tell you, good woman, I have none, unless you can prevail with the ostler to give you half of his." "Well," said she, "if he is a sober, prudent man, I shall not mind." The Princess Borghese (Bonaparte's sister), who was no saint, sat to Canova for a model, and being asked, "If she did not feel a little uncomfortable," answered, "No, there was a fire in the room."

In the same character opposite faculties and qualities are sometimes so blended as to give very mysterious results. Every reader knows how difficult it often is to separate the irony and seriousness of Swift and De Foe, so very nicely they run together. Pure imagination is so realistic as to appear indubitable truth. The History of the Plague is an example; and Robinson Crusoe: what boy ever doubted the truth of the narrative? or, while he was reading them, the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, incredible as they are? There is a story of a peasant and The Vicar of Wakefield. The dull rustic was a slow reader, and could get through but a few pages in a long evening; yet he was absorbed by the story, and read it as if it were a veritable history. A wag in the family, discerning the situation, thought to amuse himself by putting back the book-mark each morning nearly to the point the man had read from the previous evening, so that it turned out he was all winter getting through the little volume. When he had finished it, the wag asked him his opinion of it. He answered that it was good,—that he had no doubt every word of it was true,—but it did seem to him there was some repetition in it!

A clergyman's widow of eighty, the mother of the first Sir David Dundas—at one time commander-in-chief of the British army—is thus described by Cockburn: "We used to go to her house in Bunker's Hill, [Edinburgh] when boys, on Sundays, between the morning and afternoon sermons, where we were cherished with Scotch broth and cakes, and many a joke from the old lady. Age had made her incapable of walking, even across the room; so, clad in a plain black-silk gown, and a pure muslin cap, she sat half-encircled by a high-backed, black leather chair, reading, with silver spectacles stuck on her thin nose, and interspersing her studies and her days with much laughter, and not a little sarcasm. What a spirit! There was more fun and sense round that chair than in the theatre or the church. I remember one of her grand-daughters stumbling, in the course of reading the newspapers to her, on a paragraph which stated that a lady's reputation had suffered from some indiscreet talk on the part of the Prince of Wales. Up she of fourscore sat, and said with an indignant shake of her shriveled fist and a keen voice,—'The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell!'"

In the Barberini palace is the celebrated portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told in a variety of ways, and is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw her on her way to execution, and has painted her as she was dressed, in the gray habit and head-dress, made by her own hands, and finished but an hour before she put it on. "There are engravings and copies of the picture all over the world, but none that I have seen," said Willis, "give any idea of the excessive gentleness, and serenity of the countenance. The eyes retain traces of weeping, the child-like mouth, the soft, girlish lines of features that look as if they had never worn more than the one expression of youthfulness and affection, are all in repose, and the head is turned over the shoulder with as simple a sweetness as if she had but looked back to say a good-night before going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like what she was—one of the firmest and boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After murdering her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by confession, and was only moved from her constancy, at last, by the agonies of her younger brother on the rack. Who would read capabilities like these, in those heavenly and child-like features?"

There is related an incident of the American civil war which illustrates how ignorance and superstition sometimes give birth to eloquence. An army officer had been speaking of the ideas of power entertained by the poor negro slaves. He said they had an idea of God, as the Almighty, and they had realized in their former condition the power of their masters. Up to the time of the arrival among them of the Union forces, they had no knowledge of any other power. Their masters fled upon the approach of the federal soldiers, and this gave the negroes a conception of a power greater than that exercised by them. This power they called "Massa Linkum." Their place of worship was a large building which they called "the praise house;" and the leader of the meeting, a venerable black man, was known as "the praise man." On a certain day, when there was quite a large gathering of the people, considerable confusion was created by different persons attempting to tell who and what "Massa Linkum" was. In the midst of the excitement the white-headed leader commanded silence. "Brederin," said he, "you don't know nosein' what you're talkin' 'bout. Now, you just listen to me. Massa Linkum, he eberywhar. He know eberyting." Then, solemnly looking up, he added, "He walk de earf like de Lord!"

Curran, who was so merry and charming in conversation, was also very melancholy. He said he never went to bed in Ireland without wishing not to rise again. It seems to be a law of our nature that "as high as we have mounted in delight, in our dejection do we sink as low." Burns expresses it, "Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure, thrill the deepest notes of woe;" and Hood, "There's not a string attuned to mirth, but has its chord in melancholy;" and Burton, "Naught so sweet as melancholy," naught "so damned as melancholy;" and King Solomon, "I said of laughter, It is mad."

It is narrated that one day Philip III., King of Spain, was standing in one of the balconies of his palace observing a young Spanish student, who was sitting in the sun and reading a book, while he was bursting out into fits of laughter. The farther the student read, the more his gayety increased, until at last he was so violently excited that he let the book fall from his hands, and rolled on the ground in a state of intense hilarity. The king turned to his courtiers and said, "That young man is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote." One of the guards of the palace went to pick up the book and found that his majesty had guessed rightly. Yet Miguel Cervantes, the author of this book which is so amusing, had dragged on the most wretched and melancholy existence. He was groaning and weeping while all Spain was laughing at the numerous adventures of the Knight of La Mancha and the wise sayings of Sancho Panza.

The biographer of Grimaldi speaks of the devouring melancholy which pursued the celebrated clown whenever he was off the stage, or left to his own resources; and it is well known that Liston, whose face was sufficient to set an audience in a good humor, was a confirmed hypochondriac. It is said he used to sit up after midnight to read Young's Night Thoughts, delighting in its monotonous solemnity.

"The gravest nations," says Landor, "have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men. In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been rÉveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier." Robert Chambers tells in one of his essays of a person residing near London, who could make one's sides ache at any time with his comic songs, yet had so rueful, woe-begone a face that his friends addressed him by the name of Mr. Dismal. Nothing remains of Butler's private history but the record of his miseries; and Swift, we are told, was never known to smile. Burns confessed in one of his letters that his design in seeking society was to fly from constitutional melancholy. "Even in the hour of social mirth," he tells us, "my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." The most facetious of all Lamb's letters was written to Barton in a fit of the deepest melancholy.

"The elaboration of humor," said Irving, "is often a very serious task; and we have never witnessed a more perfect picture of mental misery than was once presented to us by a popular dramatic writer whom we found in the agonies of producing a farce which subsequently set the theatre in a roar."

MoliÈre was a grave and silent man. There is a story told of a lady of distinction who invited him to meet a party, thinking that he would entertain them with his wit; he came, but throughout the evening scarcely opened his lips. At PÉzÉnas they used to show a chair in a barber's shop, where he would sit for hours without speaking a word.

Jerrold was a little ashamed of the immense success of the Caudle Lectures, many of which were written to dictation on a bed of sickness, racked by rheumatism. As social drolleries they set nations laughing. He took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not like to be talked of as a funny man. His mixture of satire and kindliness reminded one of his friends of those lanes near Beyrout, in which you ride with the prickly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among it from the fields.

There is an account of a singer and his wife who were to sing a number of humorous couplets at a restaurant in Leipsic. The wife made her appearance there at the appointed hour, but, owing to the unexplained absence of her husband, she was compelled to amuse the visitors by singing couplets alone. While her droll performance was eliciting shouts of laughter, her husband hung himself in the court-yard of the restaurant.

Some one said to Dr. Johnson that it seemed strange that he, who so often delighted his company by his lively conversation, should say he was miserable. "Alas! it is all outside," replied the sage; "I may be cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!" "Are we to think Pope was happy," said he, on another occasion, "because he says so in his writings? We see in his writings what he wished the state of his mind to appear. Dr. Young, who pined for preferment, talks with contempt of it in his writings, and affects to despise everything he did not despise." The author of John Gilpin said of himself and his humorous poetry, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, would never have been written at all." Sir Walter Scott, in the height of his ill-fortune, was ever giving vent in his diary or elsewhere to some whimsical outburst or humorous sally, and after an extra gay entry in his journal just before leaving his dingy Edinburgh lodgings for Abbotsford, he follows it up next day with this bit of self-portraiture: "Anybody would think from the fal-de-ral conclusion of my journal of yesterday that I left town in a very good humor. But nature has given me a kind of buoyancy—I know not what to call it—that mingles with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours. I have a secret pride—I fancy it will be most truly termed—which impels me to mix with my distress strange snatches of mirth which have no mirth in them."

The Grand Duke of Weimar, entertaining an American author at his table, spoke of Poe, whose poem of The Raven he had never heard of until the evening previous. "The conception is terrible," he said. "Of course the Raven can only symbolize Despair, and he makes it perch upon the bust of Pallas, as if Despair even broods over Wisdom."

The Chronicle of LÜneburg, says Heine, "records that during the year 1480 there were whistled and sung throughout all Germany certain songs, which for sweetness and tenderness surpassed any previously known in German realms. Young and old, and the women in particular, were quite bewitched by these ballads, which might be heard the livelong day. But these songs, so the chronicle goes on to say, were composed by a young priest who was afflicted with leprosy and lived a forlorn, solitary life, secluded from all the world. You are surely aware, gentle reader, what a horrible disease was leprosy during the Middle Ages, and how the wretched beings afflicted with this incurable malady were driven out from all society, and from the abodes of men, and were forbidden to approach any human being. Living corpses, they wandered to and fro, muffled from head to foot, a hood drawn over the face, and carrying in the hand a bell, the Lazarus-bell, as it was called, through which they were to give timely warning of their approach, so that every one could avoid their path. The poor priest, whose fame as a lyric poet the chronicle praised so highly, was such a leper; and while all Germany, shouting and jubilant, sang and whistled his songs, he, a wretched outcast, in the desolation of his misery sat sorrowful and alone."

"There have been times in my life," said Goethe, "when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to console and to cheer me."

After Scott began the Bride of Lammermoor, he had one of his terrible seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated that fine novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained."

Jean Paul wrote a great part of his comic romance (Nicholas Margraf) in an agony of heart-break from the death of his promising son Max. He could not, one of his biographers says, bear the sight of any book his son had touched; and the word philology (the science in which Max excelled) went through his heart like a bolt of ice. He had such wonderful power over himself as to go on with his comic romance while his eyes continually dropped tears. He wept so much in secret that his eyes became impaired, and he trembled for the total loss of sight. Wine, that had previously, after long sustained labor, been a cordial to him, he could not bear to touch; and after employing the morning in writing, he spent the whole afternoon lying on the sofa in his wife's apartment, his head supported by her arm.

Washington Irving completed that most extravagantly humorous of all his works—the History of New York—while he was suffering from the death of his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman, which nearly broke his heart. He says, in a memorandum found amongst his private papers after his death, "She was but about seventeen years old when she died. I cannot tell what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I went into the country, but could not bear solitude, yet could not enjoy society. There was a dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.... When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it was produced rendered me almost unable to look upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America.... I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually roam to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

Heine, for several years preceding his death, was a miserable paralytic. All that time, it is stated, he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlet like swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any one about him; and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his precision of diction, and his invincible humor.

The wretchedness of poor Scarron, at whose jests, burlesques, and buffooneries all France was laughing, may be guessed at from his own description. His form, to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z." "My legs," he adds, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body. My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty complete abridgment of human misery." His head was too big for his diminutive stature, one eye was set deeper than the other, and his teeth were the color of wood. At the time of his marriage (to the beautiful and gifted Mademoiselle d'AubignÉ, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.!) he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood, and so completely the abridgment of man he describes himself, that his wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without screaming from pain, nor sleep without taking opium. The epitaph which he wrote on himself is touching from its truth:—

Balzac said of him, "I have often met in antiquity with pain that was wise, and with pain that was eloquent; but I never before saw pain joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame." He continued to jest to the last; and seeing the bystanders in tears, he said, "I shall never, my friends, make you weep as much as I have made you laugh."

Many of Hood's most humorous productions were dictated to his wife, while he himself was in bed from distressing and protracted sickness. His own family was the only one which was not delighted with the Comic Annual, so well thumbed in every house. "We, ourselves," writes his son, "did not enjoy it till the lapse of many years had mercifully softened down some of the sad recollections connected with it." Fun and suffering seemed to be natural to him, and to be constantly helping each other. When a boy, he drew the figure of a demon with the smoke of a candle on the staircase ceiling near his bedroom door, to frighten his brother. Unfortunately he forgot that he had done so, and, when he went to bed, succeeded in terrifying himself into fits almost—while his brother had not observed the picture. Joke he would, suffering as he might be. It is recorded of him, that upon a mustard plaster being applied to his attenuated feet, as he lay in the direst extremity, he was heard feebly to remark that there was "very little meat for the mustard." But if his wit was marvelous, so was his pathos—tender beyond comparison. His first child scarcely survived its birth. "In looking over some old papers," says his son, "I found a few tiny curls of golden hair, as soft as the finest silk, wrapped in a yellow and time-worn paper, inscribed in my father's handwriting:—

Here are a few sentences from the long letters which the author of the Bridge of Sighs wrote to the children of his friend, Dr. Elliot, then residing at Sandgate, almost from his death-bed: "My dear Jeanie,—So you are at Sandgate! Of course, wishing for your old play fellow to help you to make little puddles in the sand, and swing on the gate. But perhaps there are no sand and gate at Sandgate, which, in that case, nominally tells us a fib.... I have heard that you bathe in the sea, which is very refreshing, but it requires care; for if you stay under water too long, you may come up a mermaid, who is only half a lady, with a fish's tail—which she can boil if she likes. You had better try this with your doll, whether it turns her into half a 'doll-fin.'... I hope you like the sea. I always did when I was a child, which was about two years ago. Sometimes it makes such a fizzing and foaming, I wonder some of our London cheats do not bottle it up and sell it for ginger-pop. When the sea is too rough, if you pour the sweet oil out of the cruet all over it, and wait for a calm, it will be quite smooth—much smoother than a dressed salad.... Do you ever see any boats or vessels? And don't you wish, when you see a ship, that somebody was a sea-captain instead of a doctor, that he might bring you home a pet lion, or calf-elephant, ever so many parrots, or a monkey from foreign parts? I knew a little girl who was promised a baby-whale by her sailor-brother, and who blubbered because he did not bring it. I suppose there are no whales at Sandgate, but you might find a seal about the beach; or at least a stone for one. The sea-stones are not pretty when they are dry, but look beautiful when they are wet—and we can always keep sucking them!" To Jeanie's brother, among other things he writes, "I used to catch flat-fish with a very long string line. It was like swimming a kite. Once I caught a plaice, and seeing it all over red spots, thought I had caught the measles." To Mary Elliot, a still more youthful correspondent, he says, "I remember that when I saw the sea, it used sometimes to be very fussy and fidgety, and did not always wash itself quite clean; but it was very fond of fun. Have the waves ever run after you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps, full of water? Have you been bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid? I was the first time, and the time before that; and, dear me, how I kicked and screamed—or, at least, meant to scream; but the sea, ships and all, began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. I think I see you being dipped into the sea, screwing your eyes up, and putting your nose, like a button, into your mouth, like a button-hole, for fear of getting another smell and taste. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it is good fun; never mind tumbling over yourself a little at first.... And now good-by; Fanny has made my tea, and I must drink it before it gets too hot, as we all were last Sunday week. They say the glass was eighty-eight in the shade, which is a great age. The last fair breeze I blew dozens of kisses for you, but the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took them all to Miss H——, or somebody that it shouldn't."

You remember the anecdote Southey repeats in his Doctor, of a physician who, being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents were unrivaled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar was this poor hypochondriac himself!