you." I went and shook hands, introduced Lord John Campbell, and then sat down. I mention this trifle because it showed me at once that his astonishing elevation had not produced the slightest change. The tone-the manner everything was the same.

After dinner, he left a party he was with when I entered, and, shaking me by the hand, retired to one end of the room, where he shortly stated what had occurred within the eventful month. 66 People ask me for an account of the action," he said. "I tell them it was hard pounding on both sides, and we pounded the hardest. There was no manoeuvring," he said; "Bonaparte kept his attacks, and I was glad to let it be decided by the troops. There are no men in Europe that can fight like my Spanish infantry; none have been so tried. Besides," he added, with enthusiasm," my army and I know one another exactly. We have a mutual confidence, and are never disappointed.”—“ You had, however," I observed, "more than one-half of your troops of other nations." "That did not signify,” he said, “for I had discovered the secret of mixing them up together. Had I employed them in separate corps I should have lost the battle. The Hanoverians," he added, "are good troops, but the new Dutch levies are bad. They, however, served to fill gaps, and I knew where to place them."

Malcolm returned to India to take a leading part in the war against Holkar; but he was disappointed in not receiving the government of Bombay as a reward for his long and able military, diplomatic, and administrative services. It was only after once more returning to his native country that this act of justice was done to his merits. The Bombay government lasted only some three years. Malcolm returned to England to take a final part in the discussions upon the Reform Bill and the India Charter, when the strong man was struck low by palsy, and expired at the age of sixty-four.

Malcolm seems always to have been lucky in the friends by whom he was surrounded. His last journey out to India was enlivened by the congenial company of the then young Bombay cadet, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson-now the most distinguished Orientalist of the age. He. could not even get into a stage-coach without meeting with a character, and his account of a journey performed under such circumstances with William Cobbett is highly amusing and characteristic.

Their

But apart from this, Sir John Malcolm was in every respect one of the remarkable men of an age that numbered many such. These biographies of Mr. Kaye's cannot but serve a great and good purpose. author seems, as he goes on from one to another, to become more and more familiarised with his subjects, and to treat them in a more masterly and comprehensive manner. The days when young boys of twelve were sent, almost without any previous preparation, to fight the battles of life, as well as those of their country, in a distant foreign land, are happily gone by, but still the example afforded of what can be done by a combination of such rare qualities as are met with in a Malcolm and a Metcalfe, cannot fail to be of advantage to future aspirants. Malcolm himself reminds us, more than any person of modern times, of the hero of olden chivalry, without any of the follies or the vices of such a character.

EUTRAPELIA :

AN OMNIUMGATHERUM LITERARIUM, CHIEFLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF BARROW ON 'WIT.'

III.

ADDENDA DE RIDENDO.

-Now, by two-headed Janus,

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time:
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes,
And laugh, like parrots, at a bagpiper;

And other of such vinegar aspèct,

That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile,
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.

The Merchant of Venice, Act I. Sc. I.

A PAGE or two more on the general subject of Laughter,—and then upon the affinities and distinctions of Wit and Humour-before entering upon our more immediate and avowed theme, the exemplification of Barrow on Wit.' 6

The Philosophy of Laughter has been illustrated (obfuscated sometimes), by very numerous and conflicting speculators, expositors, and theorists, from the days of Aristotle-whose definition of ro yeλotov the moderns find it hard to mend-down to that German sovereign who, a quarter of a century ago, offered a prize for the best exegesis, in sober seriousness, of this laughable subject-the importance of which made it, in his eyes, no laughing matter.

Henri Beyle (De Stendhal), writing in 1823, remarks: "A German prince, well known for his attachment to literature, has just proposed a prize for the best philosophical dissertation upon Laughter. I hope the prize will be carried off by a Frenchman. Would it not be ridiculous for us to be beaten in this department? To my thinking, there are more jokes made at Paris in the course of a single evening, than in Germany during an entire month." And hereupon M. Beyle proceeds to pose the question, Qu'est-ce le RIRE? and supposes (that is, sub-poses) as an answer, Hobbes's celebrated theory (or rather hypo-thesis, i.e. sub-position), that laughter is simply a convulsive movement of the nerves, produced by the unexpected sight of our superiority over some one else, at whose expense, and by whose involuntary agency, the laugh is brought about. Exemplifying which theory, the French critic draws a picture of an elaborately dressed gentleman, blooming in age and costume, complacently tripping his way to the ball, whereat he meditates conquests of the electric veni vidi vici type-but who, alas for the mishaps of this chequered life, stumbles at the very threshold of his glory, and by that stumble, and its muddy result, ministers mirth to every Parisian "Jeames" who assists, officially, at the spectacle. "Le voilà dejà sous la porte cochère, encombrée de lampions et de laquais: il volait au plaisir, il tombe et se relève couvert de boue de la tête aux pieds; ses gilets, jadis

* Œuvres de Stendhal : "Racine et Shakspeare," ch. ii.

blancs et d'une coupe si savante, sa cravate nouée si élegamment, tout cela est rempli d'une boue noire et fétide. Un éclat de rire universel sort des voitures qui suivaient la sienne; le suisse sur sa porte se tient les côtés, la foule des laquais rit aux larmes et fait cercle autour du malheureux.”* M. Beyle accounts it necessary that le comique, to be such, should be clearly displayed, and that a sense of our superiority, as laughers, pro tem., over the object of our mirth, should be distinctly felt.

But long years before M. Beyle had cast his full-dress Frenchman into the mire, to excite inextinguishable laughter among lacqueys, and to illustrate the philosophy of le rire, our own, that is to say, merry England's own Sydney Smith had fixed on an analogous illustration, in his Lecture on Wit and Humour,† at the Royal Institution. We refer to the climax in his examples of incongruity as the occasion of laughter. To see a young officer of eighteen years of age come into company in full uniform, and with such a wig as is worn by grave and respectable clergymen advanced in years, would make everybody laugh (says the laughing and laugh-compelling lecturer), because it certainly is a very unusual combination of objects, and such as would not atone for its novelty by any particular purpose of utility to which it was subservient. This is the lecturer's first and, so far as it goes, complete case of incongruity. Add, he says, ten years to the age of this incongruous officer, and the incongruity would be very faintly diminished; but make him eighty years of age, and a celebrated military character of the last reign, and the incongruity almost entirely vanishes-insomuch that we might even be disposed rather to respect the peculiarity than to laugh at it. Thus comes the muddy mishap to which we alluded: "If a tradesman of a corpulent and respectable appearance, with habiliments somewhat ostentatious, were to slide down gently into the mud, and dedecorate a pea-green coat, I am afraid we should all have the barbarity to laugh. If his hat and wig, like treacherous servants, were to desert their falling master, it certainly would not diminish our propensity to laugh; but if he were to fall into a violent passion, and abuse everybody about him, nobody could possibly resist the incongruity of a pea-green tradesman, very respectable, sitting in the mud, and threatening all the passers-by with the effects of his wrath. Here, every incident heightens the humour of the scene :-the gaiety of his tunic, the general respectability of his appearance, the rills of muddy water which trickle down his cheeks, and the harmless violence of his rage."

That pea-green tradesman, and the "dedecoration" of his coat, are worthy of Sydney Smith. In making out his argument, as to the dependence of laughter on a sense of the incongruous, the lecturer added, by way of supplement, or contrast, or relief by contrast, to the pea-green tradesman, that if, instead of this, we were to observe a dustman falling into the mud, it would hardly attract any attention, because the opposition of ideas is so trifling, and the incongruity so slight. The argument is in opposition to Hobbes's definition of laughter, as "a sudden glory,

* Œuvres de Stendhal: "Racine et Shakspeare," ch. ii.

Being the eleventh of the Course, since published as "Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, delivered at the Royal Institution, in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806."

arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with infirmity of others, or our own former infirmity"-which Mr. Smith rejects as not an explanation of the laughter excited by humour, and for which he substitutes, as we have seen, a sense of incongruity, or the conjunction of objects and circumstances not usually combined.

If tears may be, as they have been, considered the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances,-laughter, on the other hand, is defined by Hazlitt* to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere surprise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances.

Aristotle defines the laughable as consisting of, or depending on, what is out of its proper time and place, yet without danger or pain. This definition is applauded by Coleridge, in repeated passages alike of his Essays and his recorded Table-Talk. In the latter he maintains, for instance, that to resolve laughter into an expression of contempt is contrary to fact, and laughable enough: "Laughter is a convulsion of the nerves, and it seems as if nature cut short the rapid thrill of pleasure on the nerves by a sudden convulsion of them to prevent the sensation becoming painful-Aristotle's Def. is as good as can be. Surprise at perceiving anything out of its usual place when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of serious danger. Such surprise is always pleasurable, and it is observable that surprise accompanied with circumstances of danger becomes Tragic."+ For, as Hazlitt observes, while the mere suddenness of transition, the mere baulking our expectations, and turning them abruptly into another channel, seems to give additional liveliness and gaiety to the animal spirits,-the instant the change is not only sudden, but threatens serious consequences, or calls up the shape of danger, that instant is our disposition to mirth superseded by terror, and laughter gives place to tears.

Man has been defined a LAUGHING Animal: one of the various definitions, all of them one-sided perhaps, which have been devised to differentiate the genus homo from lower but cognate genera, quadruped, quadrimanous, biped, and so on. Mrs. Browning refers to this definition, among others, in her new and remarkable poem:

And of even those exceptional beings-lusus nature they can hardly be called, when there is so little ludendi about or within them-of even those sporadic anomalies who are notorious, to their familiars, as persons that

* Lectures on the English Comic Writers.

"Hence Farce may often border on Tragedy; indeed, Farce is nearer Tragedy in its Essence than Comedy is."-Coleridge's Table-Talk.

But do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it? asks Carlyle, in expanding his Clothes'-Philosophy.

§ "Aurora Leigh." Book VII

:

never laugh of them, too, be sure, the story will run, that once upon a time, once at least, if only once, they laughed-laughed a portentous laugh, as anomalous as their foregoing and succeeding gravity-a laugh remembered ever since, not on the score of its singularity in point of time alone, but in point of character and significance too. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh offers, in his professorial person, a markworthy example of this. Certainly, a most involved, self-secluded, altogether enigmatic nature, that of Teufelsdröckh, exclaims his British editor; then adds"Here, however, we gladly recal to mind that once we saw him laugh; once only, perhaps it was the first and last time in his life; but then such a peal of laughter, enough to have awakened the Seven Sleepers! It was of Jean Paul's doing some single billow in that vast World-Mahlstrom of Humour, with its heaven-kissing coruscations, which is now, alas, all congealed in the frost of Death! The large-bodied Poet and the small, both large enough in soul, sat talking miscellaneously together, the present editor being privileged to listen and now Paul, in his serious way, was giving one of those inimitable Extra-harangues;' and as it chanced, On the Proposal for a Cast-metal King: gradually a light kindled in our Professor's eyes and face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest light; through those murky features, a radiant ever-young Apollo looked; and he burst forth like the neighing of all Tattersall's,-tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air,— loud, long-continuing, uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with measure, began to fear all was not right: however, Teufelsdröckh composed himself, and sank into his old stillness; on his inscrutable countenance there was, if anything, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again." This unique outburst gives occasion to Mr. Carlyle to comment, in his suggestive way, on the import and varieties of laughter. Readers who have any knowledge of Psychology, he goes on to say, know how much is to be inferred from such a phenomenon ; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. "How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile* of others

* In our last chapter we quoted Mrs. Browning in illustration of one, and that a sad and constrained, variety of that multiform Protean thing, a smile. Her new romance in blank verse, "Aurora Leigh," is curiously rich in examples of other varieties, the number and character of which attest her close observation of this dumb language of the lips, whether in babyhood or age, joyous or triste, genial and spontaneous or artificial and untrue. Thus we hear from her of

"That murmur of the outer Infinite

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
When wondered at for smiling."

Then the mournful passage

Aurora Leigh, p. 1.

"Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile

In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth

My father pushed down on the bed for that" (p. 6).

Then the graphic detail in a graphic whole, where the maiden aunt's portrait is given

"A close mild mouth, a little soured about

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,