conferred is to be reckoned among the greater blessings of civilization. It is singular that humor, so prime and constant a factor in English, should have so few books altogether its own, and these not of the greater class; but the spirit which yields burlesque in Butler and Irving, and comedy in Massinger, Congreve and Sheridan, pervades the body of English literature and characterizes it among national literatures. The highest mind is incomplete without humor, for a perfect idealism includes laughter at the real; and it is natural, for, the principle of humor being incongruity to the intellect, it is properly most keen in those in whom the idea of order, which is the mother-idea of the intellect, is most omnipresent and controlling; but as humor is thus auxiliary in character, it is found to be subordinate also in English literature as a whole. The constancy of its presence, however, is a sign of the general health of the English genius, which has turned to morbidity far less than that of other nations ancient or modern. It is a cognate fact, here, that great books are never frivolous; they leave the reader wiser and better, as well through laughter as through tears, or they sustain imaginative and sympathetic power already acquired. They open the world of humanity to the heart, and they open the heart to itself. In another region, not primarily of entertainment, the value of literature lies in its function to inspire. In individual life, each finer spirit of the past touches with an electric force those of his own kindred as they are born into the world of letters, and often for life. The later poets have most personal power in this way. Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley have been the inspiration of lives, like Carlyle and Emerson in prose. The most intense example of national inspiration in a book is Uncle Tom's Cabin; but in quieter ways Scotland feels the pulse of Burns, and England the many-mingled throbbing of the poets in her blood.