that of others;-that it is not merely different degrees of bare intellectual power which cause men to approach in different degrees to this or that intellectual programme. Could he have

foreseen the mature result of that mechanical analysis which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age the intellectual powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, the mind to which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since; to the non-mechanical theory of man-that he is in contact with a moral order on a different plane from the mechanical order-thousands, of the most various types and degrees of intellectual power, always adhere; a fact worth the consideration of all ingenuous thinkers, if (as is certainly the case with colour, music, number, for instance) there may be whole regions of fact, the recognition of which belongs to one and not to another, which people may possess in various

degrees; for the knowledge of which, therefore, one person is dependent upon another; and in relation to which the appropriate means of cognition must lie among the elements of what we call individual temperament, so that what looks like a prejudgment may be really a legitimate apprehension. "Men are what they are," and are not wholly at the mercy of formal conclusions from their formally limited premises. Browne passes his whole life in observation and inquiry; he is a genuine investigator, with every opportunity; the mind of the age all around him seems passively yielding to an almost foregone intellectual result, to a philosophy of disillusion. But he thinks it a prejudice; and not from any want of intellectual power certainly, but from some inward consideration, some after-thought, from the antecedent gravitation of his own general character-or, will you say? from that unprecipitated infusion of fallacy in him-he fails to draw, with almost all the rest of the world, the conclusion ready to hand.

WALTER PATER.

It

All

It is now a complaint of quite respectable antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The sur face of society has become smooth. ought to be a bas-relief-it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true-bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. this, and more, is alleged against us. A cheerfully disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without welldefined types of character there can be neither National Comedy nor Whimsical Novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, "And how would that matter?" the position of things becomes serious and demands a few minutes' investigation.

As we said at the beginning the complaint is an old one-most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of

we

"It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books ;— all men become alike, mere readers-spectators, not actors, in the scene, and lose all proper personal identity. The templar,-the wit, the man of pleasure and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser-Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millamant and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface, - have all met and exchanged commonplaces on barren plains of the haute littérature, toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry and metaphysics!"

Foppington,

the

Very pretty writing, certainly; nor can it be disputed that uniformity of surroundings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Modern characters like modern houses are possibly built too much on the same lines. Dickens's description of Coketown is not easily forgotten :

"All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction."

And the inhabitants of Coketown are exposed to the same objection as their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls "the shop" (that is, his lawful calling), and

busily pretends to be nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a case. An officer wears his uniform only when obliged. Doctors

have long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the British workman, who, all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a drawingroom; and a West-end clergyman is with difficulty restrained from telling his congregation what he had been told the British workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force-so unusual in such a place; but he had not the courage, and the sermon of the pavement remains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries, not of State, but of Companies, speculative builders, are of people known to many, indeed playing a great part among us, but who, for all that, have not enriched the stage with a single character, Were they to disappear to-morrow (hey! and the rue grows bonnie wi thyme), to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Shelley's west wind, where in reading or play-going would posterity encounter them? Almost alone amongst the children of men, the pale student of the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the high lonely towers' recently built by the benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over

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that interminable series 'The Law Reports,' every now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history, to us so familiar, of the bogus Company from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies in a dull court by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take а pensive interest in such

matters.

"Not one except the Attorney was amusedHe, like Achilles faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the

cause,

Knowing they must be settled by the laws."

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach; Sir Epicure Mammon; Mr. Plenty; Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context.

our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have

"Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,

Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee ?"

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. GuineaPig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder-Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the City, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess, under cover of anonymity, that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the dramatis persona of

an Elizabethan is, to say the

is a certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must.

Genuine comedy-the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity-has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; he is a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly.

Humour lies not in generalisations but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be "cross-gartered"; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities-what we call his "ways"-nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. "But indeed," wrote Charles Lamb (may the devil-the expression is the gentle Elia's-jug those who ever write poor Charles Lamb), "we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone."

Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual not the type; and though the young man in 'Locksley Hall' no doubt observes

that the "individual withers," we have but to take down George Meredith's novels to find the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiments of Poole are no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio, "Thou hast hit it; come, sit on me." No doubt, the task of the modern humourist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out-stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize: but what would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities.

If, therefore, it be the fact that our National Comedy is in a decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired

Why can we not fly, my friends? Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe "in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, 'No wings!'" but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar.

THERE is an interest about the localities in which great ideas were conceived almost greater than that attaching to the places where they were carried out. With however reverent an excitement we look at the walls of Jerusalem, our sensations are almost more poignant at the first sight of the low, bare hills with the scrubby olives and rounded terebinths where Jesus of Nazareth went apart to pray. There is often a sensation of vulgarity attaching to the concrete realisation of a grand design—a vulgarity inseparable from the materials employed and the instruments used. But there is nothing vulgar about the quiet and repose of a retreat in which so many a great ideal shaped itself in a noble mind. We are liable, too, to comprehend in such localities the full vastness of great ideas, the unapproachableness of genius. The woods, the waters, farms and fields-such a landscape as we have known and loved all our lives; and in the midst of these a human mind, like, yet so unlike ours, dreaming, devising, creating-we do not feel tempted to say, as we do at the centres of old enthusiasm, the scenes of past worldtragedies" If these advantages had been mine, if I had lived in such a crisis, if I had moved in the midst of those fiery thoughts, those inspiring individualities, I might have risen to greatness too." But alone in the homely country, face to face with Nature at her mildest, such a temptation vanishes; we wonder, and are overwhelmed.

Horton is such a place. It is in the extreme south of Buckinghamshire, in a little jutting angle of that county. It has the Buckinghamshire characteristics in the highest degree. A broad, flat, expanse, dotted with distant wood, denoting either a park

or a village; a stiff clay soil, so obdurate that after heavy rain the water lies in the fields for some time before it can soak away; a land of slow, silent, brimming streams, like the Coln, fringed with innumerable pollards; a country inexpressibly dreary in the gloomy November days, canopied over by an impenetrable mist for week after week, or with a dull river fog, settling in clammy moisture on stones and palings, and running in drops about the deposits of rotting leaves. And even on such days as that on which I last visited it, when a boisterous warm south wind was tearing and rolling up the clouds in all directions, there is a feeling of listlessness about the region. In summer, on the still dry days, over the western horizon lies a long, low, unchanging bank of dun cloud or mist, which, when stirred by a westerly breeze, rises like the genie of the Arabian Nights, and hangs a heavy garment half across the sky-the smoke of London.

The pleasantest way to approach Horton is across the fields from Datchet. As you near the village you come across a gigantic pollard oak, а remnant of the antique chase of Ditton (a similar monster stands at the corner of the Duke of Buccleuch's park, half - a - mile across the fields); then you become aware by sight of laurestinus and feathery pampas, and a certain trimness in the privet-hedge in front, that you are approaching a mansion of some kind; and now it is seena stately villa of Queen Anne's time, with that air of old-world genial comfort about it, that mellow brick and flat-topped windows contrive to give. This is a sort of out-post; a moment more, and, picking your way across a piece of marshy ground-full of dry bulrush now, and in summer of fig-wort,