This "pestilent wilfulness" is really the key to the whole position. All objective as well as subjective writers have been impotent to provide the way by which the seeker after perfect and permanent content can attain and embody it. It has been sought through wit, humor, fancy, imagination, reason; but it has been sought in vain. Our author, who, after nearly exhausting all the concrete representatives of the philosophy of Joy, admits that nobody embodies his ideal of happiness, surrenders his ideal, as far as it has been practically expressed in life or thought. Rabelais dissatisfies him; Scarron dissatisfies him; Molière, Swift, Sterne, not to mention others, dissatisfy him. Every ally he brings forward to sustain his position is reduced by analysis into a partial enemy of his creed. But while we cannot concur in Mr. Leland's theory in his exclusive statement of it, and confess to a strong liking for many writers whom he considers effeminate, we cordially agree with him in his plea for "Sunshine in Thought," and sympathize in his vigorous and valorous assault on the morbid elements of our modern literature. We think that poets should be as cheerful as possible; whereas some of them seem to think it is their duty to be as fretful as possible, and to make misery an invariable accompaniment of genius. The primary object of all good literature is to invigorate and to cheer, not to weaken and depress; it should communicate mental and moral life, as well as convey sentiments and ideas,--should brace and strengthen the mind, as well as fill it; and when it whimpers and wails, when it teaches despair as philosophy, especially when it uses the enchantments of imagination to weaken the active powers, its effect is mischievous. Woe, considered as a luxury, is the most expensive of all luxuries; and there is danger to the mental and moral health even in the pensive sadness which, to some readers, sheds such a charm over the meditations of that kind of genius which is rather thoughtful than full of thought. For the melodious miseries which mediocrity mimics, for the wretchedness which some fifth-rate rhymers assume in order to make themselves interesting, there can, of course, be no toleration. Mr. Leland pounds them as with the hammer of Thor, and would certainly beat out their brains, had not Nature fortunately neglected to put such perilous matter into craniums exposed to such ponderous blows.