lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat out

Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;

Eyes of no colour,-once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves

In smiling" (p. 11).

Then the rebuffed suitor's smile

"He smiled as men smile when they will not speak
Because of something bitter in the thought;
And still I feel his melancholy eyes

Look judgment on me" (p. 88).

Add the smile, in innocence and life's primavera, of poor Marian Earle"Somewhat large

The mouth was, though the milky little teeth

Dissolved it to so infantine a smile!

For soon it smiled on me; the eyes smiled too,

But 'twas as if remembering they had wept,

And knowing they should, some day, weep again" (p. 118).

With the contrasted falsity on the face of Lady Waldemar—

"She gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,

As if she tried it in a 'tiring glass

And liked it" (p. 217).

Nor must the smile of Marian's child be forgotten, when his eyes open from dreamland to rest on Marian and Aurora beside his bed

"The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,

And, staring out at us with all their blue,

As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence,-gradually

He saw his mother's face, accepting it

In change for heaven itself, with such a smile

As might have well been learnt there,-never moved,

But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,

So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there" (p. 250).

The same poem omits not that sad put-on smile, of a sorrowful heart, which the poetess had described so touchingly long before. Thus in Aurora's recital of her earliest days, narrating her mother's death, her father's stunned bewilder

ment

"And thus beloved she died. I've heard it said
That but to see him in the first surprise

Of widower and father, nursing me,

Unmothered little child of four years old,

His large man's hands afraid to touch my curls,
As if the gold would tarnish,-his grave lips
Contriving such a miserable smile,

As if he knew needs must, or I should die,

And yet 'twas hard,-'twould almost make the stones
Cry out for pity" (p. 4).

One more, and a characteristic, fragment to the purpose

"My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,
Because a cheerful genius suits the times,

And all true poets laugh unquenchably

Like Shakspeare and the gods. That's very hard.

The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled

With such a needy heart on two pale lips,

We cry, 'Weep rather, Dante' " (p. 92).

wards; or at best produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem."*

In juxta-position with this, however, we must place the author's objection, in the chapter next ensuing, to the definition of Man as a Laughing Animal. "Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once."+ Evidently, and naturally enough, the Professor's Able Editor prefers that only once, such as it was, to a laugh like that of their common friend, the Hofrath Heuschrecke, who played a whole laughing chorus at the Professor's table-talk: "And then, at every pause in the harangue, he [Heuschrecke, a fair German Bozzy in his way] gurgled out his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh (for the machinery of laughter took some time to get in motion, and seemed crank and slack).”‡

The province of Laughter does certainly afford ample room for a large outlay of discriminative talent-to sunder the genuine from the factitious, the precious from the vile. Laughter may be simply a nuisance; cynical or contemptuous laughter, for instance. Disgust, contempt, and laughter have indeed been pronounced nearly akin: he who enjoys nothing and values nothing, will laugh at everything.§ There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills Love, as Charles Lamb allows, in his plea for laughter as not always of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency. But how genially he hastens to set over against that sneer, the cordial laughter which cherishes and implies the Love that sneer would desolate!

says,

Out, too, upon the braying peal of people all lungs, and no ears, no nerves; sometimes of the feminine gender even; for as Clerimont in Ben Jonson, "O, you shall have some women, when they laugh, you would think they brayed, it is so rude." How fatally a noisy laugh may tell against the laugher, when the listener is shrewd, and has an ear. Thornton's laugh, for example, in Sir Bulwer Lytton's first romancea loud, coarse, chuckling laugh, which, more than a year's conversation would have done, let me into the secrets of his character.”**

66

Est modus in rebus. The Laughing Philosopher, as such, is no Philosopher at all; for he can have made but small way in the alphabet of the Philosophy of Life. Life is real, life is earnest: allow this, and the Laughing Philosopher may look out for a hermitage-the Chaulieus and Hamiltons of fact and fiction†† may keep their own counsel and their own

"Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." Book I. ch. iv.

† Ibid. ch. vi. Archbishop Whately.

"The Silent Woman," IV. 1.

Ibid. ch. iii.

On the Genius of Hogarth.
**"Pelham," ch. xxiii.

tt Voici a cabinet picture from another of Sir E. B. Lytton's romans : "We sat down to supper. Count Hamilton,' said Boulainvilliers, are we not a merry set for such old fellows? Why, excepting Arouet, Milord Bolingbroke, and Count Devereux, there is scarcely one of us under seventy. Where, but at Paris, would you see bons vivans of our age? Vivent la joie, la bagatelle, l'amour!' "Et le vin de Champagne,' cried Chaulieu, filling his glass; but what is there strange in our merriment? Philemon, the comic poet, laughed at ninety-seven. May we all do the same!'

company, their faith and practice making them an outlying population from life real and life in earnest. Not that the Crying Philosopher is the true prophet, either. Heraclitus and Democritus must meet, and compromise, and make mutual concessions, nor refuse, if a joint dynasty is impracticable, to take turn and turn about, in a world where day and night alternate, and winter is as periodical as summer, and smiles come as spontaneously as tears.

66

They say you are a melancholy fellow," quoth Rosalind to Jaques, in the Forest of Arden.

"I am so," he answers: "I do love it better than laughing."*

"Those," Rosalind rejoins, "that are in extremity of either, are abominable fellows; and betray themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards."+

To which clear ringing voice whose every accent tells, Now are we in Arden! add, in conclusion, the mild subdued tones, yet harmonious in tendency, of the pensive Recluse of Olney:‡

""You forget,' cried Bolingbroke, 'that Philemon died of the laughing.'

666 "Yes,' said Hamilton; but if I remember right, it was at seeing an ass eat figs. Let us vow, therefore, never to keep company with asses.'

Bravo, Count!' said Boulainvilliers, you have put the true moral on the story. Let us swear, by the ghost of Philemon, that we will never laugh at an ass's jokes-practical or verbal.'

"Then we must always be serious, except when we are with each other,' cried Chaulieu. Oh, I would sooner take my chance of dying prematurely at ninetyseven than consent to such a vow,'" &c. &c.-Devereux, Book IV. ch. v.

* That Jaques could laugh, however, and profited by any rare opportunity for it, afforded him in the woods and forests, we know by his own previous avowal. Witness his report of the rencontre with Touchstone-of which the finale is,

Melancholy man as William Cowper was, the notion that he was no laugher is an utter mistake as it generally is, perhaps, in the case of melancholy people. Not merely was it his delight,

"In life's morning march, when his spirits were young,"

to waste his own and his fellow "students'" time in giggling and making giggle, but when his days were in the sere and yellow leaf, and himself a "poor creature," it did not take very much to set him "laughing immoderately."" Reading Don Quixote in Smollett's translation made him, as his letters tell us, "laugh immoderately." And we all know the effect upon him of Lady Austen's narration of the tale of John Gilpin-that he lay awake half the night in convulsions of laughter.

Or take the case of Rousseau. Him many people assume to have been as incapable of laughter as a mummy, or a man in the dentist's grasp, or an old portrait of Tribulation Comfort. But Jean Jacques even boasts of his fits of inextinguishable laughter," verging on "suffocation:" "C'étaient des rires inextinguibles; nous étouffions. Ceux qui, dans une lettre qu'il leur a plu de m'attribuer," he adds, with cordial resentment at the notion of his being supposed to have laughed only twice in all his life, "m'ont fait dire que je n'avais ri que deux fois en ma vie, ne m'ont connu dans ce temps-là, ni dans ma jeunesse; car assurément cette idée n'aurait jamais pu leur venir."-Les Confessions, Livre VIII.

-Let no man charge me that I mean
To clothe in sables every social scene,
And give good company a face severe,
As if they met around a father's bier;
For tell some men that, pleasure all their bent,
And laughter all their work, is life misspent,
Their wisdom bursts into this sage reply,
"Then mirth is sin, and we should always cry.'
TO FIND THE MEDIUM asks some share of wit,
And therefore 'tis a mark fools never hit.*

THE EUPHRATES AND THE WAR IN PERSIA.†

THE Euphrates Valley Route appears to be fast passing from the stage of discussion into a reality. A concession has been at length granted in the face of deeply-concerted intrigues and of a violent opposition from nations inimical to the prosperity aud grandeur of Great Britain, and to which it would scarcely be credited some Englishmen, with names familiar to their own countrymen, were yet sufficiently little patriotic as to lend themselves. This concession extends to the whole line of country from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and embraces, we believe, a guarantee of six per cent. for the whole capital necessary to carry out so gigantic a project. It may be said to this that a guarantee from a power like that of Turkey does not possess the same solid basis for investment as a similar guarantee conceded by a more stable government. But with a few inconsistencies which had their origin in ministerial and party intrigues, the Ottoman government has always been found to be honest and upright in the main; the "sick man" exhibited at the onset of the late war, and throughout a very trying crisis, an amount of vigour and an extent of resources very little consistent with the moribund condition which some were pleased to apply to so vast an empire; and, lastly, suppose any unforeseen changes were to happen in future times in the countries concerned, it would always be the interest of all parties to protect such regions as were subsidised to a railway from anarchy and despoliation, and the very fact of giving to them such a protection would ensure to

It is fair to own, however, that Rousseau would fain be considered as past laughing in his old days. And probably there was no affectation in that. There is a form of melancholy, more than one form indeed, to which laughter is an utter stranger. La Rochefoucauld, a sufficient contrast in character to Rousseau, was, according to Madame de Sévigné, capable of distinguished feats in the art de rire; but his account of himself in early manhood includes this avowal: "Premièrement, pour parler de mon humeur, je suis mélancolique, et je le suis à un point que depuis trois ou quatre ans à peine m'a-t-on vu rire trois ou quatre fois."Portrait du Duc de la Rochefoucauld, par lui-même.

* Cowper's Poems: "Conversation."

Memoir on the Euphrates Valley Route to India. By W. P. Andrew, F.R.G.S. London: W. H. Allen and Co. 1857.

them-that which is so much wanted in some parts of the Turkish Empire -a stable and permanent government.

The distinguished engineer, Sir John Macneill, who has explored the Mediterranean terminus of the projected railroad during the past summer, under the guidance of General Chesney, ascertained, from the transport which takes place across the so-called "Iron Bridge" on the Orontes, that a railroad to Aleppo alone would be a paying speculation. According to the toll-books, more than 1200 laden camels and horses pass that bridge every day. Yet this bridge is not upon the main line of traffic between Aleppo and its seaport, Alexandretta, which is to the north of the Lake of Antioch. The price of transport of a ton is now 67. from Aleppo to the sea. The railway will be able to transport it at from 18s. to 22s., which will bring down a great number of goods, that are now lost for want of transport.

The same eminent engineer ascertained to his satisfaction that there is every facility for making a harbour in the Bay of Antioch, not far from the mouth of the Orontes, and at the foot of Mount Casius, and that by making a little détour, and gaining the uplands of North Syria by the valley of the Afreen river-the same line as that taken by General Chesney during the transport of the matériel of the Euphrates Expedition-no engineering difficulties present themselves, and that the railway may be constructed at from 6000l. to 80007. per mile. By such a détour a rich settled country, dotted over with towns and villages, is also accommodated, and branch lines will be unnecessary.

But it is not Turkey alone which will feel the beneficial results which are sure, sooner or later, to follow the execution of such projects. Adjoining Turkey is a kingdom once as rich and nearly as powerful, but which through ages of misrule has become little better than a theatre for the disputes of diplomatists. Save as a means through which England can thwart Russia, or Russia irritate and threaten our Eastern empire, the existence of Persia has almost ceased to be a matter of consideration with European nations:

But this can no longer be the case where passenger steamers shall periodically traverse the Persian Gulf, and the electric cable be extended along its shores. The commercial intelligence and enterprise of Europe will then once more revisit its ancient haunts in the factories where Genoese and Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch, and English successively sought the custom of the "Grand Sophy of Persia," and his then wealthy subjects; European civilisation will then insensibly pervade the Persian Empire by the same influences which are already at work in the ancient kingdom of the Mamelukes; and, as her interests become identified with ours, Persia will learn to take her place, as Turkey has already assumed hers, in the great federation of civilised nations.

The present crisis of affairs in Persia shows how important such a state of things would be to the interests of India and of England. Utterly devoid of any substantial power, and secure in her remoteness, Persia ventures to put a slight on our ambassador, and attempts to purchase the support of Russia by disturbing our Affghan frontier. To bring this feeble and faithless power to her senses may require some palpable exhibition of our power in the shape of expensive expeditions, whose best result can only be an apology for an insult, or the retraction of an unfounded claim. No one can doubt for a moment but that our differences with Persia_might have been settled months ago had the Euphrates Valley Railway and Electric Telegraph been in operation. Persia would then have seen that we possess the means of landing, at a few weeks' notice, upon