which Thackeray delineates with his usual delight when the Cumberland stamp-disswift and bitter strokes, is the incongruity tributor said that Shakespeare was a very of the heart, the incongruity between clever man, delight which he displayed by the suggested feeling of remorse and lighting a bed-candle, dancing round him, Becky's selfish self-reproach; while the and calling out, "Allow me to have a look couplet in Pope contains nothing but a care- at that gentleman's organs," while Wordsful incongruity of metaphors and of literary worth, in utter horror, tried to restrain him proportions. Burlesque, travesty, carica- by reiterating, "Charles, my dear Charles!" ture, parody, satire, contemptuous parable was pure humour. There was hardly any of that grim and saturnine kind in which intellectual operation involved in the matter Swift was so great a master, and finally, the at all, only the rapid transition of Lamb's humour rooted in the deepest and most deli- own personal feeling from sleepy indiffercate sense of the inconsistencies of human ence to the most vivid curiosity on hearing motive and feeling, are all varieties of the so silly a remark. Where any other man same genus, essays in incongruity by minds would simply have laughed, Lamb, in spite more or less susceptible to the pleasant of his soporific brandy-and-water, was apshock caused by various shades of incongru-parently stimulated into the most intense ity. When Hamlet follows in imagination desire to explore the sources of such a moral the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bung-hole, he is in precisely the mood of mind which gives birth to humor, and if it does not exactly touch the springs of laughter it is only because the contrasts between the humiliation of the flesh and the triumphs of the spirit have in all ages been so much the theme of meditation that we have ceased to feel the incongruity as a surprise, which is an absolate condition of the specific effect of either wit or humour. enigma; and the humour lies in his having realized the absurdity of the remark so much more vividly than he realized the conventional restraints imposed by social habits, that he could only ignore the latter altogether in his delight at finding a fine specimen of the literary idiot. So, again, Lamb's ready answer to the Highgate omnibus conductor, who put his head in to ask, “All full inside?" when Lamb was half asleep in the corner, "I really can't answer for the The difference so deeply felt between a other ladies and gentlemen, but that last wit and a humorist consists only, we be-piece of pudding at Mrs. Gilman's did the lieve, in the greater degree of sharp intel- business for me," was so humourous, not lectual parodox on the one hand, or of the from the ready pun on the meaning of the parodox of personal and subjective feeling conductor, but from the picture it presents on the other, which is at the basis of the to us of the interior mind of Charles Lamb, surprise. When Voltaire described taking gravely assuming that the question was dimedicine as "putting drugs of which we rected to the state of his stomach, and of know little into bodies of which we know the impulse of perfect candour which apless," the whole form of the criticism was peared to induce him to make this frank sharply intellectual, and involved exceed- confession to the assembled company. ingly little, if any, of that rapid gliding from one personal and subjective phase of feeling to another of an opposite kind to which it stands in paradoxical contrast, which is of the essence of humour. But when Coleridge, in his bitter attack on somebody's porter, asserted that "dregs from the bottom half-way up and froth from the top half-way down constituted Perkins' Entire," that was a flash half-way between wit and humour. The theoretical accuracy of the exposition, the satire implied in the contrast between this spurious combination of dregs and froth and the word Entire (integer) which expresses specifically wholeness and soundness of essence, were all what what we should call wit; but the ripple of personal feeling in passing from the disgust of a thirsty man who has found his porter all undrinkable, to so intellectual a form of invective on it, is of the very essence of humour. Again, Charles Lamb's tipsy Now, applying this distinction between the tickling of the intellectual sense of incongruity involved in pure wit, and the ready transition from one condition of personal feeling to another almost inconceivable in close connection with it which is implied in humour, to the case of Mr. Dickens, we think we may fairly say that there was comparatively little of the wit, and a truly astounding amount of the humourist in him. Even his poorest successes, the successes in way of parody and travesty, with which he opened the "Pickwick Papers," are feats of humour,- for instance," there sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and enlightened the scientific world with his theory of tittlebats, as calm and unmoved as the silent waters of the one on a frosty day, or a solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar," - even this is humour, though humour of a comparatively poor kind. The contempt with which tion of "Martin Chuzzlewit," he is infinitely Dickens enters into the ostentatious rhetoric of charlatan science, the skill with which he chooses the illustrations most humiliating to it, and the high-sounding gravity with which he conducts his elaborate metaphors to a close, all transport you to the interior of his mind, and make you experience for yourself the slight moral shock with which you find the grandeur of the Parliamentary and the spurious scientific style of oratory undermined and toppling down into very closely-allied nonsense. Just the same somewhat superficial but very lively humour pervades the whole of the admirable American parodies in "Martin Chuzzlewit." When Mr. Putnam Smif writes that every alligator basking in his slime is in himself an Epic self-contained," or Miss Codger dilates on the thrilling nature of the impressions on her feelings with which she finds herself introduced to a Pogram by a Hominy," but asks herself why she calls them her feelings, or why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if there really is, oh, gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles," the humour surely consists in the exhibition of that close affinity between inflated intellectual ambition and positive idiocy, which by happy and easy touches of exaggeration the humourist renders so glaring. The humourist, we believe, as distinguished from the wit, always moves on the inner line of impulse and motive, always identifies himself more or less with the secret springs of paradox, always plays on the moral paradoxes of the mind within; while the wit occupies a critical and external position, and makes his play with the cross-purposes and antitheses he discovers in the field of external thought or action. The most decisive note of the former is the preference for speaking by the very mouth of the person to be made ludicrous, of the latter the preference for launching criticisms at him from outside. Where humour and wit are blended, as they are so often are, the procedure is double, as, in the saying of Coleridge we have analyzed above; there is, in the first place, a sharp intellectual paradox to excite amusement; and then, when we pass beneath it to the play of feeling and motive in the mind of the wit, we find grotesque contrasts of moral scenery which are more amusing still, because they display humour as well as wit. And if Dickens may fairly be called a great humourist in his moods of burlesque and travesty, such as those in the early part of "Pickwick," and of the American por more so in those moods in which he displays - -- the control of mere speculators and offer above four per cent. were never so dear; risky loans for millions, like that loan for Peru, are taken with avidity; the cup is getting full, and in all human probability some new burst of speculation is at hand, which may take a beneficial form for instance, we could get rid of a hundred millions in making cheap country railways with immense advantage. but will more probably turn out to be a mere method of depletion. However it goes, the country is once more getting rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers. The people, as Mr. Goschen showed by unimpugnable figures, are consuming more sugar, more tea, more beer, spirits, and tobacco, more in fact, of every kind of popular luxury, than ever. Their savings have also increased, while the exports of cotton, of wool, of linen, of iron, of machinery, have reached a figure wholly be more delicate and real painting of Lady Catherine de Vere's immeasurable self-importance. The humour does not consist in the reality of the whole picture in either case, but in the shock of surprise with which the grotesque blending of mean and pretentious elements in human nature is in both cases alike brought home to the reader. Where this shock is keenest, and fullest of real moral paradox, the feat of humour is greatest. And that this is often greatest in cases where the humourist has left something out of nature, and perhaps exaggerated something else in it, in order to bring home his special paradox more powerfully, seems to us past doubt. Consider the wonderful humour with which the enormous and immeasurable vanity of the last person one would think likely to indulge vanity, a snuffy, intemperate, monthly nurse, is brought out in Mrs. Gamp. The mixture of brutal selfishness with that vanity is a much less subtle touch, for that might be sug-yond precedent. By the testimony of all gested by the professional character of the woman. But the inexhaustible humour of the picture of Mrs. Gamp consists in her vanity and the subtleties of device to which she has to resort in order to gratify it. These are the kind of conceptions which seem to us to place Dickens at the very head of all English humourists. His best figures are pure embodiments of his humour, -not real characters at all, but illustrations, conceived with boundless wealth of conception, of the deepest moral incongruities of the heart. THE "weary Titan" still staggers along, oppressed, it may be, by the "too vast orb of his fate," or it may also be by his own stupidity, but at least it is not for want of bit and sup that his strength is overborne. Mr. Goschen's lucid and forcible speech of Friday week will, we trust, remove some of that sense of nervous depression which every now and then saps English strength more seriously than sickness. A hundred symptoms show that the cycle of gloom which set in in 1866 with the fall of Overend, Gurney, and Co. is at length passing, has, indeed, almost passed away. The nation is again making money at an enormous rate, and driving every kind of decently secure investment up to unprecedented figures. Foreign Stocks, Indian Stocks, Home Railway Shares, all securities which are beyond manner of men-Factory Inspectors, PoorLaw Inspectors, Members for great cities the Lancashire trade, the silk trade, the flax-spinning trade, the lace trade, and above all, the iron trade, are all so flourishing that the want is not of work to be done, but of hands to do it. Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed, been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some parts of the country, that Mr. Goschen believes that internal emigration would do more to help the people than emigration to America, while it is certain that no relief which can be afforded by the departure of a few workpeople is equal to the relief caused by the revival of any one great trade-relief, we must add, which would be more rapid and diffused if the Trades' Unions in this one respect at least false to their central idea of the brotherhood of labour-were not so jealous of the intrusion of outsiders. There is hardly a trade into which a countryman of thirty, however clever, can enter at his own discretion — one of the many social disqualifications which press upon the agricultural labourer. The picture thus drawn by Mr. Goschen, and truly drawn for the President of the Poor-Law Board is a man who does not manipulate figures, but treats them with the reverence of the born statist — is a very pleasant one, especially to those who believe that wealth is the foundation of civilization; but yet what a weary load it is that, according to the same speech, this country is carrying, and must carry! There are advice. The country can but go on endeav1,100,000 paupers on the books, and not ouring and endeavouring, if it may be, to reone tenth of them will be taken off by any duce the burden by slow degrees. We may, revival whatever, for not a tenth of them if we have the courage and the energy, turn are workers. The rest are children the Unions into hospitals, board out all chil350,000 of them alone-widows, people dren, till, sharing the lot of the workers, past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, they may catch something of their readiness human drift of one sort or another, the to toil; refuse all relief save that of the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost hospital, and above all, leave the ableof suffering, helplessness, and disease. In bodied poor to meet as the able-bodied addition to the burden of the State, in ad- above them do the pecuniary misfortunes dition to the burden of the Debt, which we of life. By the abolition of the legal right talk of as nothing, but without which Eng-to relief, by the refusal of all relief out of land would be the least-taxed country in doors, and by compelling children to acthe world, this country has to maintain an quire capacity to work, we may limit the army of incapables twice as numerous as evil, and only limit it. All these things the Army of France, to feed, and clothe, will, we believe, be done in time; but we and lodge and teach them, an army which regret the ever new questions which arise she cannot disband, and which she seems to delay the solution of this transcendent incompetent even to diminish. To talk of one. It is not Mr. Goschen's fault, or Mr. emigration, of enterprise, even of educa- Gladstone's, and yet we confess to a disaption, as reducing this burden, is almost pointment that this Ministry has not shown waste of breath; for cripples do not emi- more eagerness to commence its greatest grate, the aged do not benefit by trade, task, the campaign which it must wage when education is universal children must against pauperism, against the popular still be kept alive. While the Poor Law readiness to plunder by a demand for alms. exists, with its fatal lesson that starvation The conciliation of Ireland is a great task, is not the divinely-appointed penalty of idle- and so is the organization of our adminisness and unthrift, while the whole population trative machinery; but the extinction of is taught by the law, by the respectables, pauperism is a greater still, so great that it and by the clergy that it has a right to visibly daunts even our present rulers, and throw its relatives on the parish, any seri- makes optimists like ourselves, who hold ous lifting of the burden would seem to be that difficulties disappear as we advance, beyond human hope. We at least see none, shrink from recommending the efforts which save in such an alteration of the law as may we yet know to be indispensable. Let once more permit the extinct virtues to de- ministers say and journalists write what they velop themselves, such a return to stern will of British prosperity, what is the use principles as shall once more retone the of it all while our labourers are housed like national mind. We despise the Southern cattle, while our cities are pauper-warrens, races for the way in which they tolerate without air, or light, or beauty, while a mendicancy, but how are they worse than half of our people look to charity to mainwe, who give to every mendicant a legal tain them in old age, and while a million right to a share in the income of the of human beings are only kept alive by worker? It is in this direction, in a solidi- compulsory deductions from the income of fication of flaccid opinion, that we see hope, those who toil? and in this alone; not in an emigration which can but remove those who create wealth, leaving behind those who consume it; not in any revival of trade, which will not diminish our burden, but only increase our capacity to bear it; not in any social change, which cannot give health to the sick, or strength to the aged, or experience to childhood; and even in this direction the hope we see is very slight. So firmly convinced are we of the evils of the Poor Law, that we believe its total extinction would cause less suffering and less evil than its continuance; but no statesman in Parliament will risk soul as well as body upon that heroic remedy of despair. We would not risk it ourselves, even by irresponsible From The Spectator. CANADA AS AN ALLY. "IF you have a friend who is warmly attached to you, and who is efficient, who can and will help you in your undertakings and wants but little friendship in return, snub him continually. It will develop his selfreliance, and self-reliance is good for people." That is the substance and moral of the extremely interesting and extremely cold-hearted speech with which Lord Northbrook on Monday entertained the House of Lords, a speech which we greatly fear has not been read as widely as it deserved that they elect the rulers in whom, efficient to be. No more striking testimony to the or inefficient, they confide; that it is left to value of English institutions and English them to stand by the State or to desert it; principles of statecraft has ever been given, and that all this liberty in excess is consistthan his account of the advance made by ent with citizenship in an Empire of vast the Dominion towards an independent and resources and a history of a thousand years a noble national life. A philosopher like - have made up for every other deficiency, De Tocqueville, studying five years ago to and the new State born only yesterday is as discern the chances of a future career for strong for battle as many a monarchy of Canada, would have said that all the cir- the Old World. The Home Government cumstances which statesmen are accustomed contributed officers, experience, a few regto take into consideration were, on the iments as instructors, a military tradition, whole, unfavourable to the rise of a new and about half a million's worth of military nation. A people few in number, and oc-stores, and the Dominion itself provided all cupying a terribly scattered territory un-else that was required. With a courage usually devoid of advantage of climate, deserving all praise, her statesmen proposed made up of two races, speaking two lan-and her Parliament accepted an Act placing guages, and believing two widely separated every male between 18 and 60 at the disand usually hostile creeds, were compelled posal of the Crown for service in the event in their weakness to build up a State by the of invasion; and this principle once estabside of the mightiest Republic in the world, lished, the rest was left to the Executive. a Republic ambitious, aggressive, and at Mr. Macdonald, the Scotch Protestant, the moment emerging victorious from a war found the means; Sir Etienne Cartier, the of unprecedented magnitude and duration. French Catholic, devised the system, and This people, moreover, was by historical in less than 20 months a true though cheap circumstance inexperienced in the arts of army of 600,000 militia had been organized, statecraft, by law compelled to submit to and in Lord Monck's opinion could be actthe policy of another State three thousand ually called into the field, with its permamiles away, and by temperament precluded nent staff in complete order, and with no from establishing the iron organization less than 5,300 officers regularly educated which has so often in the history of the in military schools. Out of these men, world enabled a petty people to defy ap-again, an advance guard, so to speak, of parently irresistible assaults. Canada 40,000 Volunteers has been organized, could not be to North America what the ready for active service on any emergency, Prussia of Frederick was to Europe. Above and so real is their willingness, so thorough this people, thus weakened by social differ- their discipline, that when the last Fenian ences and vast material distances, was a raid but one tested the strength of the CanaLegislature framed by provincial delegates, dian Government, 1,095 officers, 12,394 whose first care was that Parliament should men, 863 horses, and 18 guns were within not be too strong, and guided by men who forty-eight hours on active service in moseemed to the statesmen of the Old Worldtion against the enemy, and the number big children playing at legislation, by a could have been doubled without a delay of Cabinet in which the leaders were an acute hours. The Dominion, in fact, has an effecScotch-Protestant Premier, with a tendency tive and moveable army of 40,000 men, just to reckless joviality; and a light-hearted, as well-disciplined as any army likely to easy-going French Catholic Minister at War, oppose it, and a reserve almost as great, raised to his position through the implicit and likely to be as efficient, as the army confidence felt in his fidelity by the Catho- which its mighty neighbour could summon lic priesthood. Our philosopher certainly into the field. It is no longer a mere conwould have predicted that such a Govern-geries of provinces lying open to invasion, ment, even if it succeeded in legislation, but an armed State, which it would take would break down in military organization, time, and generalship, and treasure, and would lack the feeling of nationality and bloodshed to conquer, which could maintain the impulse of self-defence, that what a struggle almost as formidable as that supwith English control and want of experience and social circumstances, the Dominion must be a nearly powerless State. Yet it is precisely at this point that the Canadian Government has succeeded beyond all hope or precedent. The grand merits of the contrivance that the people are attached to it, that they are free and happy under it, ported by the South, which in the very worst event could give the Empire time to bring up its forces to the struggle which even the Colonial Office admits it would be dishonourable to avoid. No result of a policy could be more satisfactory; but then, what is that result? Surely this,-first of all, that we have in |