people ostentatiously and pretentiously cheerful being not unfrequently foolish people: their spirits of a brisk but thin quality—nothing about them in good working order. “For, in truth, the most fortunate existence has cares enough to make gravity our normal condition.” Roland Graeme, in the “Abbot,” earnestly assures his vivacious companion, “Ay, but, fair Catherine, there are moments of deep and true feeling, which are worth ten thousand years of liveliest mirth.” Melancholy Minna is a fine relief by contrast to laughter-loving Brenda; and it is suggestively told us of the old Udaller, their sire, that he liked his graver damsel better in the walk without doors, and his merry maiden better by the fireside; and that if he preferred Brenda after the glass circulated in the evening, he gave the preference to Minna before noon. So with Molly and Cynthia in “Wives and Daughters:” Molly always gentle, but very grave and silent; Cynthia merry, full of pretty mockeries, and hardly ever silent—only this constant brilliancy became a little tiresome in everyday life, being not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, so much as the “glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confuses and bewilders.” The union of what can be harmonized of the two distinctive characters, is sure to be engaging in no ordinary degree. As in the Beryl of “George Geith.” “You imagine,” says Beryl, on one occasion, “because it is necessary to my existence to laugh at people’s oddities, that I never feel for their woes. You think, because I have a quick sense of the ludicrous, that I have no eyes for grief. And there you do me an injustice.” Such as Beryl will be found to take exception to predominant levity in the masculine gender, after the manner of the fair tenant of Wildfell Hall: “I do wish he would be sometimes serious,” she writes of her endeared Arthur: “I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don’t mind it now, but if it be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?” Tired out with such companionship, a complainant in one of Lovell Beddoes’ tragedies exclaims,— “I’m weary of their laughter’s empty din. Methinks, these fellows, with their ready jests, Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike Marriage or death.” Rather than have her uniformly saccharine and smiling, Ben Jonson’s Curius avowedly would have his mistress “angry sometimes, to sweeten off the rest of her behaviour.” * * * * * Sir Walter Scott, in one page of his Diary, noting the break-up of a hilarious group of guests at Abbotsford, adds the avowal, “I am not sorry, being one of those whom too much mirth always inclines to sadness.” Even the bright extremes of joy, as Thomas Hood the elder words it, bring on conclusions of disgust:— “There is no music in the life That sounds with idiot laughter solely; There’s not a string attuned to mirth But has its chord in melancholy.”