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 resplenIdent 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,

66

"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 66 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.

66

"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

mental nature, cleared the way for the explanation of our delight in those vivid impressions

"down, down, down," and "round, round, round," in the "Chimes ?" Such overdoing as this surely "can not but make the judicious grieve."

Now compare the crudity of the above piece of verbal trickery with the high polish and sparkle of the following bit of elegant artifice from Sheridan's wonderful elaboration of wit, "The School for Scandal." It will be seen that it is still the contrasted figure of speech that gives the fine relish to the subjoined dainty morsel of literary luxury; and though it has all the studied artificiality of wit, and wants the honest geniality of delicate humor to give it the true ring of spontaneous rather than affected merriment, nevertheless, it must be confessed that the play and oscillation of the antithesis is kept up in a masterly manner, and that the whim vibrates as airily and elegantly as a shuttlecock between the battledores in skillful hands.

"SIR PETER TEAZLE.-When an old bachelor marries a young wife, what is he to expect? "Tis now six months since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of men, and I have been the most miserable dog ever since! We tift_a_little going to church, and fairly quarreled before the bells had done ringing. I was more than once nearly choked with gall during the honeymoon, and had lost all comfort in life before my friends had done wishing me joy. Yet I chose with caution-a girl bred wholly in the country, who never knew luxury beyond one silk gown, nor dissipation above the annual gala of a race-ball, though she now plays her part in all the extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town with as ready a grace as if she never had seen a bush or grass-plot out of Grosvenor Square !"-SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL, Act I., Scene 2.

The "luxury" of the "one silk gown," and the "dissipation" of the "annual gala of the race-ball," as well as the "bush or grass-plot out of Grosvenor Square," are nice delicate touches of wit, though out of the contrasted form.

As another illustration of the contrary form of wit, we may cite those paradoxical maxims which startle us with their opposition to common opinion, and yet with their truthfulness to a certain kind of debased nature, as, for instance, when Rouchefoucauld defines gratitude to be "a lively expectation of favors to come," and Talleyrand explains speech to be the faculty given to man as the means of concealing his real thoughts and feelings.

which are connected with states of mental excitement, and the understanding of the latter subject has, in its turn, fitted us, in a measure, for the due comprehension of the charms which spring from our instinctive longing for a state of mental ease. Before we can desire or feel the delights of ease, however, we must exist in some state of uneasiness. Rest and repose are pleasurable to us only after violent exertion and consequent fatigue, even as exercise itself is especially charming after long rest and consequent tedium. So, again, before we can feel satisfied, we must have hungered; there must have been a precedent craving in order to enjoy that thorough contentment of soul which is a necessary consequence of the perfect appeasement of the previous longing. We must therefore, Ben, set about discovering what this state of mental uneasiness is, that corresponds with the bodily uneasiness of appetite, as well as with the wearisomeness of physical fatigue; we must do this before we can get thoroughly down to the source of the delight which comes from the allaying of the uneasy feeling. Now, though we are gladdened by change, or slight differences, and agreeably astonished by the perception of extreme differences among things, we are, on the other hand, disgusted by any mere heterogeneous chaos or confused tangle of ideas and objects. The transitions from one state of mind to the other, which make us so delighted with change and variety, must, in order to delight us, be essentially rhythmical, as it were; that is to say, there must be a mellifluence, or nice gradation about it, or else it would not correspond with that series of gentle and congenial muscular actions which is termed physical exercise. Again, the inordinate vividness of the impressions, which causes us to find so much mental pleasure in the more aston