worthy of him. He was a dramatist. That is a different matter. Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were dramatists so were Racine and Corneille : so was Schiller. Dramatic poets are descended from epic poets, who were originally inspired to write by subjects more or less supernatural. There is a difference between the Tragic Muse, the Epic Muse, and the Muse of the Sublime Hymn."

"Of whom the last was the first, the greatest and the most religious," said Cæsar. "Even with us, who were imitators, religious tradition lay at the root of almost all poetry."

66

'Why are modern hymns so horribly bad?" asked Lady Brenda.

"Because Milton, who was the only modern capable of writing sublime hymns, only wrote one-the Ode on the Nativity," answered Heine.

"Modern hymns are rough specimens of poetry when they are poetry at all, and are not written as a rule by poets. Some of them are stirring enough, some are pathetic, a great many are sentimental, and all are religious. But they are poor literature. People do not avoid reading them because they are religious, but because they are badly written."

"Not so easy as you imagine, madam," answered Heine with a smile. "To write a hymn one must be a great, great poet, which I do not pretend to be one must be directly inspired by the strongest religious emotions, such as I never felt; and one must have the power to be grand in simple language, which power no one has possessed since Milton. But though nobody writes hymns in our day, religion has such a part in poetry that I doubt whether any one who knew absolutely nothing about Christianity could understand five stanzas of any good modern poet. Christianity pervades everything we think, write, and do. We cannot get rid of the

consciousness of it. Men may blaspheme and abuse it, but they are only losing their temper because they cannot break Christianity down, as a child screams and beats with its little fists on the heavy door it cannot open. Atheists would be less violent in their language if they were really persuaded that there was no God. Religion is there in spite of them. Other men may be indifferent, selfish, and occupied with their own affairs; but they are perfectly conscious that they mean to be tolerably religious when they have time, and they feel an uncomfortable sense of uneasiness when they have done something which is not contrary to law but contrary to religious morality. It is laughable to see a man of that sort trying to beat the devil round the bush, while perfectly conscious that the devil is there; and how he will make haste to do the bad thing he wants to do while he has succeeded for five minutes in muzzling his conscience, lest the uneasy sense of doing wrong should mar his enjoyment of it. A man in that condition always reminds me of a dog meditating the theft of a piece of meat. He hesitates, wags his tail in anticipation, then looks away with a sheepish expression, wags his tail again, springs on the morsel, gulps it down, and then skulks off with his tail between his legs, in the profound consciousness of sin."

"Yes," said Cæsar with a soft laugh. "Men have always been like that; but they are more so now than they used to be, because Christianity has popularised the notions of right and wrong, and extended them to many points which they did not formerly cover. The question, when a man wanted to do something for his own advantage, used to be, Can it be done safely? The question now is, What will the world think of it?"

"Rather contemptible," remarked Augustus.

"No, I think not," objected Cæsar. "It shows that morality has improved when a man hesitates to do a bad deed on account of what the world will say.

It shows that he wishes to appear moral because most people are moral, and he desires not to be thought different from other men. It does not prove him any better, but it shows that the general standard is higher. It is a good evidence that, whereas formerly might was right, at

present day what is called right is right according to a universal and established opinion. In other words, men are restrained from doing wrong by a principle, and not by the violent opposition of anybody who is strong enough to resist their outrageous deeds."

"And the change can only be attributed to the influence of Christianity," said Pascal, who had been listening in silence for some time. "I do not see that it can be referred to anything else, because nothing else has been felt through all civilised nations at once. Races differ fundamentally in character. Governments are not in any two modern nations conducted on the same principles. But the broad questions and rules of right and wrong are established everywhere alike upon the Christian system, and cannot be said to be derived from any other source. It is useless to tell people that they may arrive at the conclusions of Christianity without accepting Christianity itself, by analysing the elements of happiness according to the laws of reasonable inquiry. Perhaps they can; but if they do, they have only proved how good a thing Christianity is. If you compare the number of men who might be induced to lead good lives from purely logical motives with those who have led good lives by believing in their religion, the number of the first will appear insignificantly small. To sustain this valuable morality, therefore, you must do one of two things. Either you must maintain the religion that inculcates morality as a consequence of belief, and which has done it successfully; or you must show that every ploughboy, who has been taught at Sunday school to distinguish between right

and wrong, is enough of a philosopher to grasp a highly philosophical topic, to follow it through its inevitable logical stages, to arrive at its conclusions, and to practice the laws he has thus elaborated, because they satisfy his reason, and not because they appeal to his conscience. I will not use any strong epithets to designate the judgment of those who believe the ploughboy capable of all this. It is enough to say that ploughboys are not able to think deeply enough to do what would be expected of them. But should your reformer persist in destroying religion, in the hope that the ploughboy may be made a philosopher in the course of a few generations of education, your reformer will find himself obliged to employ a stronger force than existing civil law to coerce the ploughboy, during the interval between the loss of conscience and the acquisition of the philosophical capacity.'

"That is true," answered Cæsar. "I see many proofs of it in the present day. These perpetual riots of the anarchists in all parts of the world are the work of men who have lost their belief in religion and their sense of right and wrong, but who have acquired no philosophical intelligence in the place of what they have lost. The result, as you say, is the necessity of coercion, ending in the hanging of numbers of these fellows. It is charac

teristic of these men that they do not say what they want. On the contrary, they say they want nothing, as they express it. Their object is to tear down, not to build up. This wanting nothing is the result of their thinking nothing during the suspension of their intellectual faculties, which have lost belief and gained nothing instead."

"And what would you do to stop all this?" asked Lady Brenda.

"I would maintain religion and the law," said Cæsar. "It is not my opinion that the existing morality of nations can be destroyed; but it is certain that it should not be molested. The only objects of government are the maintenance of safety against

dangers from without and of order within the state. Governments which fail in either of those points must inevitably fall. Therefore any government which permits anarchic principles, or a condition of morality which will lead to the propagation of such principles, is doomed."

"Yes," answered Heine, " and it is doomed to a very odd kind of civil war —a war in which the question will be, do you believe in God? Not unlike the French Revolution, except that it would be worse. I dare say the unbelievers might get the better of it for a time."

"In the Latin nations-nowhere else," said Cæsar. "Popular fury of that sort soon dies out, because it never really spreads to the masses of the people. It is a kind of insanity to which the great centres are subject. Bands of furious men spring up, curse God and die, and the next generation sows its wheat upon their graves, and quietly puts up the crosses they tore down. Southern people are more liable to such fits."

"It is dreadful to think that such a civil war must be," exclaimed Diana. "We cannot realise the French Revolution, nor anything like it."

"If there is to be such a war in any nation," said Pascal, modern scientists as a body will be held responsible for it, rightly or wrongly, just as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and their various supporters have been said to have caused the French Revolution. But I do not think that such a catastrophe is to be expected. The French Revolution was really caused in a great measure by the fearful oppression of the nobles. Now the cry is the oppression of capital. That means that the immediate object of the anarchists is to divide the existing wealth of the capitalists, and the object is insignificant as compared with the question of emancipation from the old seignorial rights which formerly agitated France. You may destroy capital, but it will accumulate again in an incredibly

short space of time. The utter futility of the idea stamps it as that of most ignorant men, who, as Cæsar said, think nothing, and wish to produce nothing by tearing everything to pieces and gorging themselves with the fragments. But it is quite true that if there are enough of these fellows in the world to make a revolution, the result will be a civil war, in which the question asked will be, do you believe in God, or do you not? And those who do and those who do not will make up the two armies in the field."

CHAPTER XVI.

"OH, do let us be less serious today!" exclaimed Lady Brenda on the following afternoon, as the whole company found themselves together on the seashore in a deep and shady cove of the rocks.

"Paullo minora canamus!" said Doctor Johnson, thrusting his oaken club into the sand and sitting down upon a smooth boulder.

"Is it possible to be funny to order, whenever one likes?" asked Gwendoline.

"Rarely," answered her husband. "The majority of people are most amusing when they least wish to be, and most dull when they give themselves the greatest trouble to amuse.'

"What do you mean by being funny?" asked Diana, turning to Gwendoline.

was no bad whisky; but he admitted that some kinds of whisky might be better than others."

"Sir," said Johnson, " was a guzzler."

your friend

"He was," assented Augustus. "A man who drinks everything he can lay his hands on is a drunkard, and a man who laughs at everything he hears is a fool."

"How do you define wit?" asked Lady Brenda, who had a happy faculty for putting very difficult questions.

"In the sense in which we are speaking of it," answered Doctor Johnson. "Wit means the effect of wit, for the word wit means originally the faculties of the intellect; but what we mean is the result produced by the efforts of a lively fancy. The principal means of exciting laughter in others is to present to their eyes or their minds a brief and forcible contrast. Madam, I have seen the vulgar at a penny show laughing very heartily at the sight of a very tall man standing beside a very little man. The tall man alone is an object of astonishment, and the dwarf alone will elicit remark owing to the exiguity of his body; but the two must be placed side by side in order to excite laughter by the contrast of their proportions. Generally, when we are amused by the contrast between two things, it is because the magnitude of the one causes the meanness of the other to appear contemptible."

"Yes," said Pascal, musing. "I think that one of the surest methods of ascertaining the truth of a comparison is by reversing the terms of it. When it is untrue, the effect is so startling that it produces laughter. Call Molière the Aristophanes of his age, if you please. It is a great compliment to Molière. But when you say that Aristophanes was the Molière of his age, the comparison strikes me as ridiculous, and i laugh. But you need not go far to find comparisons much more absurd and untrue than that, and far more laughable if re

versed. It is the contrast displayed which makes us laugh."

"Docter Johnson did that very effectively," remarked Augustus. "He said of Lord Chesterfield, that he had thought him a lord among wits, but that he found he was only a wit among lords."

"That was not wit, sir," answered Johnson; "it was truth." "Cannot the truth be witty?" "Yes, sir; when it surprises."

"But there must be something inherent in the contrast, besides the truth or falsity of it, which makes it laughable," said Heine. "It was easy for me to call the young Hanoverian nobles asses: that would not have been funny; but when I said they were asses who talked of nothing but horses, everybody laughed."

"Because the first statement is only a brutal comparison," answered Pascal. "By adding the second half of the phrase you introduce a second piece of abuse which implies a contrast, associated with the first by the connection between the ass and the horse in our minds. Mere brutality can never be amusing to intelligent minds."

"Very little," returned Heine;" and then only when it is grossly disproportioned to its object, and perfectly harmless. Now I remember in England hearing a navvy say, 'Damn my eyes if I don't have a pint with you!' 1 laughed; but I did not laugh the next time I heard it. I grew sick of the exaggeration."

"I remember a story of that kind," said Augustus, "told me by an officer who commanded a corps in the American civil war. He was in his tent one morning, when a shell fell somewhere in the camp and exploded. His quarter-master, who had never seen fire, rushed into the tent in the greatest excitement. 'General,' he shouted, 'hell's busted-and there's a mule killed!'”

"I think that is more humorous than witty," remarked Gwendoline.

"It is not true wit," assented her husband, "because there was no witty

intention. The quarter-master did not mean to be funny, but we laugh at the liveliness of his imagination. It is very much the same with Irish humour, which is often quite unintentional. An Irish cook one day told her mistress that she was about to be married. And who is he?' inquired the lady. 'And I'm sure you'll be remembering the burial in the spring,' answered Biddy; 'and it's the husband of the corpse, m'm, and you'll be sure that was the very toime he honoured me by saying that I was the light of the funeral.' Bridget did not mean to be funny-it was pure accident. That is unintentional humour. The Irish love of putting things agreeably, too, is often very amusing. An Irishman rings at the door of a house on a snowy day and asks the housemaid to lend him a spade to clear the pavement next door. She gives him what he wants a plain shovel, just like any other. And is it your spade,

miss?' he asks. 'Yes,' says she. 'Well, miss,' he answers, 'I'm tremendiously obleeged to ye, and, mirover, I'm bound to say that you have a very pretty taste in spades.' He only meant to be complimentary-he was funny by accident."

"It is easy to understand why we laugh," remarked Pascal. "It is another matter to analyse the nature of what makes us laugh. I believe that a man who understands that can construct witty phrases and stories at will. In the first place, it is certain that wit depends chiefly upon some striking contrast, and then upon the way the contrast is expressed. Then comes the question of bringing the contrast into the right part of the sentence, which is a matter of style. Wit, then, depends upon imagination, command of language, and good taste; and those who have possessed all three in the highest degree have probably been the wittiest men. Probably Shakspeare had all three more than any other man who ever lived, and he is probably the wittiest writer who has ever been known."

'Altogether," said Heine, "no one man ever wrote so many witty things, and I think that your definition of the requirements of wit is a good one. Command of language and good taste may with study and judgment make an essayist, an historian, or a philosopher, fit to rank high in literature apart from their mere acquirements. A poet must have a good imagination, of the sensitive, delicate kind. But it is the man of redundant, overflowing, well-fed, sanguine imagination who is witty, and who, if he possesses a command of language, can produce the works of a Rabelais, and if he has good taste besides can write the plays that Shakspeare wrote."

"The witty man," observed Johnson, "must command an immense variety of images, in order that he may select grave ones or laughable ones according to the dictates of his taste. Discrimination, sir, is a great element in wit. Thomas Paine was right when he said that, 'one step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.' It is very true."

Paine

"I always thought Napoleon said that," remarked Lady Brenda. He may have said it, madam, but I do not believe he invented it. wrote the book in which that sentence is contained in the year 1793, when Napoleon was nobody, and Robespierre was not yet president. Paine, madam, was a bad man with too much common sense."

"In digging up your bones, Tom Paine, Will Cobbett has done well: You visit him on earth again, He'll visit you in hell,' quoted Augustus. 'Byron was of your mind, sir,” he added.