A couple of generations ago most people would have opened their eyes wide at any one who should have thought remarks like these worth making. Such truth formed part of the universal tradition of civilisation and moral culture. But a wilful melancholy, and, the twin sign of corruption, a levity which acutely fears and sympathises with pains which are literally only skin-deep, have been increasing upon us of late in a most portentous way. The much-vaunted growth of “humanity” has been due rather to a softening of the brain than of the heart. Huge moral ill, the fact of national degradation, the prospect of national disaster, arouses less pain in the sympathetic hearts of humanitarians than the yelp of a poodle which has had its ear pinched. Men and times do not talk about the virtues they possess. Which is more inhuman: to punish with rack and wheel the treason which voluntarily sacrifices or jeopardises the welfare of millions, or to condone or ignore it for the sake of momentary ease? The England in which melancholy and levity are becoming prevalent habits is merry England no more. “The nation thou hast multiplied, but not increased the joy.” And we are not the only nation which deserves this lamentation of the prophet. The growths of melancholy and levity have been still more marked in France. In America, some traveller has remarked, “there is comfort everywhere, but no joy.” America is accordingly the only country which has no art. It is, as we have said, a vulgar error to consider Dante a melancholy poet. In the whole range of art, joy is nowhere expressed so often and with such piercing sweetness as in the _Paradiso_; and it flashes occasionally through the dun atmosphere of the other parts of the poem. The _Inferno_ is pervaded by the vigorous joy of the poet at beholding thoroughly bad people getting their deserts; and the penances of purgatory are contemplated by him with the grave pleasure which is often felt by the saner sort of persons, even in this world, under the sufferings they acknowledge to be the appropriate punishment of and purification from the sins they have fallen into. Shakespeare is the most cheerful of poets. We read his deepest tragedies without contracting even a momentary stain of melancholy, however many tears they may have drawn from us. Calderon flies among horrors and disasters on the wings of a bird of Paradise, without any resulting incongruity; and like things may be said of the greatest painters and musicians, until quite recent times. But since about the beginning of this century how many of our geniuses have mingled their songs with tears and sighs over “insoluble problems” and “mysteries of life” which have no existence for a man who is in his right senses and who minds his own business; while the “scrannel pipes” of the smaller wits have been playing to the sorry Yankee tune of “There’s nothing new, and there’s nothing true, and it doesn’t signify.” Music has taken to imitate the