Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, tells us, with thinly veiled disapprobation, that he was “a man of fine and ready wit, full of life, and very pleasant, but much turned to satire. His imagination was too hard for his judgment, and a severe jest took more with him than all arguments whatever.” Yet this was the first statesman of his age, and one whose clear and tranquil vision penetrated so far beyond the turbulent, troubled times he lived in, that men looked askance upon a power they but dimly understood. The sturdy “Trimmer,” who would be bullied neither by king nor commons, who would “speak his mind and not be hanged as long as there was law in England,” must have turned with infinite relief from the horrible medley of plots and counterplots, from the ugly images of Oates and Dangerfield, from the scaffolds of Stafford and Russell and Sidney, from the Bloody Circuit and the massacre of Glencoe, from the false smiles of princes and the howling arrogance of the mob, to any jest, however “severe,” which would restore to him his cold and fastidious serenity, and keep his judgment and his good temper unimpaired. “Ridicule is the test of truth,” said Hazlitt, and it is a test which Halifax remorselessly applied, and which would not be without its uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in whom this adjusting sense is lamentably lacking. For humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh! What healthy exultation, what genial warmth, what loyal brotherhood of mirth, attends the friendly sound! Yet in labeling our life and literature, as the Danes labeled their Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, “Not for amusement merely,” we have pushed one step further, and the legend too often stands, “Not for amusement at all.” Life is no laughing matter, we are told, which is true; and, what is still more dismal to contemplate, books are no laughing matters, either. Only now and then some gay, defiant rebel, like Mr. Saintsbury, flaunts the old flag, hums a bar of “Blue Bonnets over the Border,” and ruffles the quiet waters of our souls by hinting that this age of Apollinaris and of lectures is at fault, and that it has produced nothing which can vie as literature with the products of the ages of wine and song. ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. In a fair and far-off country, hidden to none, though visited by few, dwell a little band of lovely ladies, to whose youth and radiance the poets have added the crowning gift of immortality. There they live, with faint alluring smiles that never fade; and at their head is Helen of Troy, white-bosomed, azure-eyed, to whom men forgave all things for her beauty’s sake. There, too, is Lesbia, fair and false, laughing at a broken heart, but holding close and tenderly the dead sparrow