the anecdote of the dull and prosy clergyman, who was reproving his flock for their habit of going to sleep during the sermon, and who sought to shame them by reminding them that even Jimmy, the wretched idiot in the free seats, could keep himself awake; whereupon a wag returned that 'if Jimmy hadn't been a wretched idiot, he would have been asleep too'-in this anecdote, of course, it is the unexpectedness of the retort-the sharp backward cut of the foil, that startles us as much as any thing. So, too, in that pinchbeck kind of wit called punning, we are taken aback by the double meaning of the term on which the pun is

where the several events of history have been, as it were, rattled together in some droll kaleidoscopic fancy, and made to tumble into the queerest possible forms. Akin to these intentional anachronisms, or "cross-times," as it were, are the "cross-readings," or those curious jumbles of sense that either startle us to laughter with the oddness of the ideas that are thus brought into juxtaposition, or else set us wondering at the ingenuity of the arrangement. There are a few specimens of this form of fun preserved in the "New Foundling Hospital for Wit," the principal of which are extracts from the old "Public Advertizer," and the drollery of which consists in the odd associations that are frequently brought about by reading a newspaper across two adjoining columns rather than down each column singly in the usual manner, e. g. :

Last night the Princess Royal was baptized- Mary alias Moll Hackett, aliasBlack Moll. Yesterday the new L'd-mayor was sworn in- afterward tossed and gored several persons.

Again, in the double letter attributed to Cardinal Richelieu (which, when read in single columns, expresses one sense, and when read across has a totally different signification), there is enough art to make us marvel at the skill, and yet such a sense of labor with it all, that our admiration is alloyed with the idea that it was hardly worth while taking such pains, as the author must, to compass so trifling an end, to wit:

made, and thus pleasantly startled again by the use of the word in a different sense from what we expected. When King Charles the Second, for instance, bade Rochester make a joke, and Rochester asked the monarch to name a subject, the ready reply of the wit, on the king's naming himself, that his majesty could not possibly be a" subject," startles us slightly, when we first hear it, from the widely different sense given to the word subject itself. Moreover, it is to the vivid impressions produced by widely different and diametrically opposite ideas and objects, when made to succeed one another immediately in the mind, that such lively delight is found in the principle of contrast, as I before explained to you, lad, though then. I enforced upon you the charms that belong principally to contrasted physical objects. In art, however, the extremes of contrast are often effective for a while, though your mere black and white style of painting generally belongs to that coarser kind of effect which is requisite to enliven duller perceptions and tastes. The figure of antithesis, nevertheless, is always brilliant in literary composition; for there is a natural sparkle in the collocation of any two directly opposite ideas, as, for instance, in the two terms of life-the cradle and the grave; the two extremes of human emotions-smiles and tears; the two opposite types of wealth and want-Dives and Lazarus; of worldly power and helplessness-the monarch and the slave.* Again, as the high lights of a picture are always in the foreground, and the greatest depth of shade to be found there too, so even Shakspeare himself often resorts to the principle of contrast to throw up the brilliances of some of his fore

*The delight that some find in paradoxes, and even in what the vulgar will call "contrayriness," may be referred to the same principle.

T

most characters. Thus, in 'Romeo and Juliet,' the old nurse is an exquisite foil to bring out all the lustre and richness of the young, ripe love of Juliet; and even in the contemplativeness of the old friar, sworn to celibacy and the life of an ascetic, and yet who is sufficiently human to delight in matrimony and the beautiful world about him, what a charming set-off have we to the hot-blooded young Romeo, now moody in woods, and now burning with the flame of his first real passion; and what a lively relief, again, is the merry and voluble light-heartedness of the fairy-spirited Mercutio even to Romeo himself! Moreover, in 'Lear,' what exquisite contrasted force is there in those extremes of demention - the two opposite and widely distant verges of mental eccentricityshown in the wild madness of the king and the cunning foolery of the fool! And so in Hamlet' we have the touching and tender madness of the young, broken-hearted girl, as depicted in Ophelia, contrasted with the insanity of purpose'-the mental wandering and vacillation of a weak and noble nature-exemplified in Hamlet himself. The grave-scene, too, in the same play, is resplendent with the same brilliance of contrasted idiosyncrasies; for here we have the quaint logical merriment of the old grave-digger played off against the fine philosophic utterances of the young Danish prince-all these are sufficient to show you, lad, that the principle of contrast, when nicely and skillfully handled, can lend some of its highest and most lustrous beauties to the picture. And with that ends the list of the chief pleasures that arise from mental excitement, my son.' ""*

* The best example of the literary glitter produced by the figure of contrast is, so far as we know, the collocation of the wonders revealed by the telescope and microscope, penned by Dr. Chalmers, and which is certainly a brilliant instance

THE PLEASURES OF MENTAL SATISFACTION.

"And now you're going to do the pleasures of mental satisfaction, ain't you, uncle ?" asked the boy.

of its kind. There is perhaps a leetle too much art apparent in the balance of the sentences, and continued vibration of the mind from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, and perhaps it is just a taste too saccharine to fully satisfy the highly educated palate. Nevertheless, as an illustration of the charms of this rhetorical form, it is at once signal and salient.

"The one led me to see a system in every star; the other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of immensity; the other teaches me that every grain of sand may harbor within it the tribes and the families of a busy population. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread upon; the other redeems it from all its insignificance, for it tells me that in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers of every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament. The one has suggested to me that beyond and above all that is visible to man there may be fields of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Almighty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe; the other suggests to me that within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may be a region of invisibles; and that, could we draw aside the mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has unfolded-a universe within the compass of a point so small as to elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder-working God finds room for the exercise of all his attributes-where He can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and animate them with all the evidences of his glory."

The only fault here, we repeat, is the obviousness of the art ("ars est celare artem"), so that the reader is led to see the trick, as it were, by which the effect is produced. The fairy piece which enchants us from the front of the theatre is but poor tawdry clumsy work viewed from behind the scenes, and hence the verses of Pope and Tommy Moore,

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"Yes, lad," was the answer; for the consideration of the love of change, inherent in our exquisitely artistic as they are, become mere elaborations of wit rather than flashes of true poetic fire-choice specimens of mental handicraft from the very excess of art that has been wasted upon them, rather than those fine facile creations which precede rule instead of following it; so that to pass from the dead level of the perfect polish of such work to the rich, rough, and forcible fervor of true poetic genius, as shown in Shakspeare, is the same as shifting the mind from the contemplation of mere filigree-work to the stupendous achievements of modern engineering-from looking at a Berlin bracelet in spun cast-iron to the massive grandeur of the tubular bridge or the dizzy triumph of the "via mala."

But if the quotation from Dr. Chalmers is hardly a perfect specimen of this form of literary beauty, because the artistry of it is just a shade too marked, what can be said of the following extract, where we have not a scintilla of beauty, but merely clap-trap artifice and extravagance instead? Here the form which, with a person of true taste, can be made to yield such exquisite delight, becomes positively ugly as an oilman's shop front from the patchwork of glaring colors in which it is tricked out. The effect is consequently merely "loud," not "tasty;" and that black and white, which in a Rembrandt's etching is a world of beauty, becomes as vulgar and inartistic as the sign of the "Checkers" on a public house door.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief; it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light; it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope; it was the winter of despair; we had every thing before us; we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to heaven; we were all going direct the other way; in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."-TALE OF TWO CITIES.

Such fatal blemishes as the above are really like rash attempts at literary suicide in a man who has no necessity to stoop to trick to produce an impression. But who can forget the wretched" artful dodges" of "the kettle began it;" no, "the cricket began it," in the "Cricket on the Hearth,' and the raving melodramatic rubbish of "up, up, up," and