France!--and which made her think Thackeray very nearly as wicked, sophistical, and immoral as the French novels. Even her dislike for children was probably due to the same irremediable misfortune; for the humors of children are the only redeeming points amid their general naughtiness, and vexing misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guiltless himself of any jocose tendencies, has made the unique discovery that Charlotte Brontë strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul Emanuel is a modern counterpart of Don Quixote; and well it is for our poet that the irascible little professor never heard him hint at such a similarity. Surely, to use one of Mr. Swinburne’s own incomparable expressions, the parallel is no better than a “subsimious absurdity.” On the other hand, we are told that Miss Austen owed her lively sense of humor to her habit of dissociating the follies of mankind from any rigid standard of right and wrong; which means, I suppose, that she never dreamed she had a mission. Nowadays, indeed, no writer is without one. We cannot even read a paper upon gypsies, and not become aware that its author is deeply imbued with a sense of his personal responsibility for these agreeable rascals, whom he insists upon our taking seriously,--as if we wanted to have anything to do with them on such terms! “Since the time of Carlyle,” says Mr. Bagehot, “earnestness has been a favorite virtue in literature;” but Carlyle, though sharing largely in that profound melancholy which he declared to be the basis of every English soul, and though he was unfortunate enough to think Pickwick sad trash, had nevertheless a grim and eloquent humor of his own. With him, at least, earnestness never degenerated into dullness; and while dullness may be, as he unhesitatingly affirmed, the first requisite for a great and free people, yet a too heavy percentage of this valuable quality is fatal to the sprightly grace of literature. “In our times,” said an old Scotchwoman, “there’s fully mony modern principles,” and the first of these seems to be the substitution of a serious and critical discernment for the light-hearted sympathy of former days. Our grandfathers cried a little and laughed a good deal over their books, without the smallest sense of anxiety or responsibility in the matter; but we are called on repeatedly to face problems which we would rather let alone, to dive dismally into motives, to trace subtle connections, to analyze uncomfortable sensations, and to exercise in all cases a discreet and conscientious severity, when what we really want and need is half an hour’s amusement. There is no stronger proof of the great change that has swept over mankind than the sight of a nation which used to chuckle over “Tom Jones” absorbing a few years ago countless editions of “Robert Elsmere.” What is droller still is that the people who read “Robert Elsmere” would think it wrong to enjoy “Tom Jones,” and that the people who enjoyed “Tom Jones” would have thought it wrong to read