As to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun,—for as Shakspeare words it, “How many things by season seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection!”—be sure that the Wise King includes laughter and weeping in the list. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh.” Acquainted with grief, he had also been familiar with merriment. He had said in his heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth; but the result was that he said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What doeth it?—For all this, he freely recognises a time to laugh, so that one keep to the time. So much depends, here, on the due observance of times and seasons. It is with the frivolous habit of laughing out of season, and at all seasons, that the following notes are concerned. The laureate’s is a good keynote to begin with:— “Prythee weep, May Lilian! Gaiety without eclipse Wearieth me, May Lilian.” So with Barry Cornwall and his Hermione:— “Something thou dost want, O queen! (As the gold doth ask alloy,) Tears,—amidst thy laughter seen, Pity,—mingling with the joy.” Such a conjunction as the courtier records of Cordelia in “King Lear”—sunshine and rain at once: “her smiles and tears were like a better day: those happy smiles that played on her ripe lip, seemed not to know what guests were in her eyes:” “in brief, sorrow would be a rarity most beloved, if all could so become it.” Nothing, we often hear it said, is so tedious as uniformity; and under the bright sky of Italy one sometimes sighs for a cloud. “A gay writer, who,” says Horace Walpole, “should only express satisfaction without variety, would soon be nauseous.” Johnson’s Papilius winds up his confession, in the “Rambler,” with a whine on the melancholy necessity of supporting that character by study, which he gained by levity; having learned too late that gaiety must be recommended by higher qualities, and that mirth can never please long but as the efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxuriance, but esteemed for its usefulness. There must be fruitage as well as blossomy “efflorescence;” as Cowper is fain to enforce, when in the closing lines of the “Task,” he records how he once, when called to dress a sofa with the flowers of verse, played awhile with that light task, obedient to the fair:— ... “but soon, to please her more, Whom flowers alone I knew would little please, Let fall the unfinished wreath, and roved for fruit.” Mark Mrs. Browning’s picture of the Lady Geraldine:— “In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly— Has a grace in being gay, which even mournful souls approve, For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.”