Quod petis, hic est;

Est Ulubris: animus si te non deficit æquus.

But then the question is, how to get the animus æquus : and I think that now-a-days there is with some a disposition to push the principle of

My mind to me a kingdom is,

too far. Happiness is indeed a mental condition, but we are not to forget that mental states are very strongly, very directly, and very regularly affected and produced by outward causes. In the vast majority of men outward circumstances are the great causes of inward feelings, and you can count almost as certainly upon making a man jolly by placing him in happy circumstances, as upon making a man wet by dipping him in water. And I be

lieve a life which is too subjective is a morbid thing. It is not healthy nor desirable that the mind's shadow and sunshine should come too much from the mind itself. I believe that when this is so, it is generally the result of a weak physical constitution: and it goes along with a poor appetite and shaky nerves and so I hail Sydney Smith's recommendation of sugar-plums, bright fires, and simmering kettles, as the recognition of the grand principle that mental moods are to a vast extent the result of outward conditions and of physical state. If Macbeth had asked Dr. Forbes Winslow the question

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?

that eminent physician would instantly have replied,'Of course I can, by ministering to a body diseased.' No doubt such mental disease as Macbeth's is beyond the reach of opiate or purgative, and neither sin nor remorse can be cured by sugar-plums. But as for the little depressions and troubles of daily life, I believe that Sydney

ences.

Treat them

Don't expect the

Smith proposed to treat them soundly. physically. Treat them ab extra. mind to originate much good for itself. With commonplace people it is mainly dependent upon external influIt is not a perennial fountain, but a tank which must be replenished from external springs. For myself, I never found my mind to be to me a kingdom. If a kingdom at all, it was a very sterile one, and a very unruly one. I have generally found myself, as my readers have no doubt sometimes done, a most wearisome and stupid companion. If any man wishes to know the consequence of being left to his own mental resources, let him shut himself up for a week, without books or writingmaterials or companions, in a chamber lighted from the roof. He will be very sick of himself before the week is over: he will (I speak of commonplace men) be in tolerably low spirits. The effect of solitary confinement, we know upon uneducated prisoners, is to drive them mad. And not only do outward circumstances mainly make and unmake our cheerfulness, but they affect our intellectual powers just as powerfully. They spur or they dull us. Till you enjoy, after long deprivation, the blessing of converse with a man of high intellect and cultivation, you do not know how much there is in you. Your powers are stimulated to produce thought of which you would not have believed yourself capable. And have not you felt, dear reader, when in the society of a blockhead, that you became a blockhead too? Did you not feel your mind sensibly contracting, like a ball of india-rubber, when compressed by the dead weight of the surrounding atmosphere of stupidity? But when you had a quiet evening with your friend Dr. Smith, or Mr. Jones, a brilliant talker, did he not make you talk too with (comparative)

brilliancy? You found yourself saying much cleverer things than you had been able to say for months past. The machinery of your mind played fervidly; words came fittingly, and thoughts came crowding. The friction of two minds of a superior class, will educe from each much finer thought than either could have produced when alone.

And now, my friendly reader, the upshot of all this which I have been saying is, that I desire to recommend to you a certain overlooked and undervalued thing, which I believe to be a great source of content and a great keeper-off of depression. I desire to recommend something which I think ought to supplant Sydney Smith's kettle and sugar-plums, and which may co-exist nicely with his cheerful fire. And I beg the reader to remark what the end is towards which I am to prescribe a means. It is not suprema felicitas: it is quiet content. The happiness which we expect at middle age is a calm, homely thing. We don't want raptures: they weary us, they wear us out, they shatter us. We want quiet content; and above all, we want to be kept clear of over-anxiety and of causeless depression. As for such buoyancy as that of Sydney Smith himself, who tells us that when a man of forty he often longed to jump over the tables and chairs in pure glee and light-heartedness, why, if nature has not given you that, you must just do without it. Art cannot give it you: it must come spontaneous if it come at all. But what a precious thing it is! Very truly did David Hume say, that for a man to be born with a fixed disposition always to look at the bright side of things, was a far happier thing than to be born to a fortune of ten thousand a year. But Hume was right, too, when he talked of being born with such a disposition. The hope

ful, unanxious man, quite as truly as the poet, nascitur, non fit. No training could ever have made the nervous, shrinking, evil-foreboding Charlotte Brontë like the gleeful, boisterous, life-enjoying Christopher North. There were not pounds enough in that little body to keep up a spirit like that which dwelt in the Scotch Professor's stalwart frame. And to indicate a royal road to constant light-heartedness is what no man in his senses will pretend to do. But we may attain to something humbler. Sober content is, I believe, within the reach of all who have nothing graver to vex them than what James Montgomery the poet called the 'insect cares' of daily life. There may be, of course, lots which are darkened over by misfortunes so deep that to brighten them all human skill would be unavailing. But ye who are commonplace people, commonplace in understanding, in feeling, in circumstances; ye who are not very clever, not extraordinarily excitable, not extremely unlucky; ye who desire to be, day by day, equably content and even passably cheerful; listen to me while I recommend, in subordination of course to something too serious to discuss upon this half-earnest page, the maintenance of a constant, pervading, active, all-reaching, energetic TIDINESS!

No fire that ever blazed, no kettle that ever simmered, no sugar-plums that ever corroded the teeth and soothed to tranquil stupidity, could do half as much to maintain a human being in a condition of moderate jollity and satisfaction, as a daily resolute carrying out of the resolution, that everything about us, our house, our wardrobe, our books, our papers, our study-table, our garden-walks, our carriage, our harness, our park-fences, our children, our lamps, our gloves, yea, our walking-stick and our um

brella, shall be in perfectly accurate order; that is, shall be, to a hair's breadth, RIGHT!

If you, my reader, get up in the morning, as you are very likely to do in this age of late dinners, somewhat out of spirits, and feeling (as boys expressively phrase it), rather down in the mouth, you cannot tell why; if you take your bath and dress, having still the feeling as if the day had come too soon, before you had gathered up heart to face it and its duties and troubles; and if, on coming down stairs, you find your breakfast-parlour all in the highest degree snug and tidy, the fire blazing brightly and warmly, the fire-irons accurately arranged, the hearth clean, the carpet swept, the chairs dusted, the breakfast equipage neatly arranged upon the snow-white cloth, it is perfectly wonderful how all this will brighten you up. You will feel that you would be a growling humbug if you did not become thankful and content. 'Order is Heaven's first law:' and there is a sensible pleasure attending the carrying of it faithfully out to the smallest things. Tidiness is nothing else than the carrying into the hundreds of little matters which meet us and touch us hour by hour, the same grand principle which directs the sublimest magnitudes and affairs of the universe. Tidiness is, in short, the being right in thousands of small concerns in which most men are slovenly satisfied to be wrong. And though a hair's breadth may make the difference between right and wrong, the difference between right and wrong is not a little difference. An untidy person is a person who is wrong, and is doing wrong, for several hours every day; and though the wrong may not be grave enough to be indicated by a power so solemn as conscience (as the current through the Atlantic cable after it had been injured, though a