In cases of this kind, where exclusion is due to hard prejudices of caste or of religion, a man who has all the social gifts of good manners, kind-heartedness, culture, and even wealth, may find himself outside the pale if he lives in or near a small place where society is a strong little clique well organized on definitely understood principles. There are situations in which exclusion of that kind means perfect solitude. It may be argued that to escape solitude the victim has nothing to do but associate with a lower class, but this is not easy or natural, especially when, as in Dobell's case, there is intellectual culture. Those who have refined manners and tastes and a love for intellectual pursuits, usually find themselves disqualified for entering with any real heartiness and enjoyment into the social life of classes where these tastes are undeveloped, and where the thoughts flow in two channels,--the serious channel, studded with anxieties about the means of existence, and the humorous channel, which is a diversion from the other. Far be it from me to say anything that might imply any shade of contempt or disapprobation of the humorous spirit that is Nature's own remedy for the evils of an anxious life. It does more for the mental health of the middle classes than could be done by the most sublimated culture; and if anything concerning it is a subject for regret it is that culture makes us incapable of enjoying poor jokes. It is, however, a simple matter of fact that although men of great culture may be humorists (Mr. Lowell is a brilliant example), their humor is both more profound in the serious intention that lies under it, and vastly more extensive in the field of its operations than the trivial humor of the uneducated; whence it follows that although humor is the faculty by which different classes are brought most easily into cordial relations, the humorist who has culture will probably find himself _à l'étroit_ with humorists who have none, whilst the cultured man who has no humor, or whose humorous tendencies have been overpowered by serious thought, is so terribly isolated in uneducated society that he feels less alone in solitude. To realize this truth in its full force, the reader has only to imagine John Stuart Mill trying to associate with one of those middle-class families that Dickens loved to describe, such as the Wardle family in Pickwick. It follows from these considerations that unless a man lives in London, or in some other great capital city, he may easily find himself so situated that he must learn the art of being happy without society. As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.