The maxim that an author who desires to make us weep must be affected himself by what he writes, is too trite to be repeated in its original language. Both authors and actors however can produce this effect without eliciting a spark of feeling from their own hearts; and what perhaps may be deemed more remarkable, they can with the same success excite merriment in others, without partaking of it in the slightest degree themselves. No man ever made his contemporaries laugh more heartily than Scarron, whose bodily sufferings were such that he wished for himself _à toute heure Ou la mort, ou santé meilleure:_ And who describes himself in his epistle to Sarazin, as _Un Pauvret Tres-maigret; Au col tors, Dont le corps Tout tortu, Tout bossu, Suranné, De'charné, Est reduit Jour et nuit, A souffrir Sans guerir Des tourmens Vehemens._ It may be said perhaps that Scarron's disposition was eminently cheerful, and that by indulging in buffoonery he produced in himself a pleasurable excitement not unlike that which others seek from strong liquors, or from opium; and therefore that his example tends to invalidate the assertion in support of which it was adduced. This is a plausible objection; and I am far from undervaluing the philosophy of Pantagruelism, and from denying that its effects may, and are likely to be as salutary, as any that were ever produced by the proud doctrines of the Porch. But I question Scarron's right to the appellation of a Pantagruelist; his humour had neither the heighth nor the depth of that philosophy. There is a well-known anecdote of a physician, who being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents were unrivalled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar was this poor hypochondriac himself! The state of mind in which such men play their part, whether as authors or actors, was confessed in a letter written from Yarmouth Gaol to the Doctor's friend Miller, by a then well-known performer in this line, George Alexander Stevens. He wrote to describe his distress in prison, and to request that Miller would endeavour to make a small collection for him, some night at a concert; and he told his sad tale sportively. But breaking off that strain he said; “You may think I can have no sense, that while I am thus wretched I should offer at ridicule! But, Sir, people constituted like me, with a disproportionate levity of spirits, are always most merry when they are most miserable; and quicken like the eyes of the consumptive, which are always brightest the nearer a patient approaches to dissolution.”