But it is only for the time. The well of genius in Rabelais may be inexhaustibly deep; and yet the gem of truth which we seek does not glitter in its depths. What was the moyen de parvenir of the laughing philosopher? To secure money to buy pleasure, to lift one's soul by philosophy above the vulgar, to consort with rare good fellows and merry dames wherever we can find them 'hang care, it killed a cat-and let us get drunk!' 'Yes, above all things, O friends! let us drink!'

---

'WHILE round a fat ham we carouse it together,

The clouds clear away and make room for fine weather.'

'Wine in pailfuls, beer in rivers!' Sweep the floors, give these beggars something; kick me that sturdy vagabond out of doors tra la la lera! Gossip, have you no merry tale? By the blessing of GOD, this is a very fine year for drinking. 'Yea,' quoth she. 'Therefore, let us drink fresh- white wine, if you can get it; but come what may, get drunk!' Literally or imaginatively, let us be drunk!

I can conceive and know by experience that to the young mind which hungers for truth and joy, there is something irresistibly fascinating and persuasive in this jolly philosophy and reckless, well-balanced worldly wisdom of Rabelais. Unfortunately — like the joyousness of the ancient Greeks — it is, though far more generally applicable, any thing but attainable to the whole world. 'Rabelais laughing in his easy chair,' must be surrounded by jolly good fellows of the bon Gaultier and franc compagnon sort. He must be the perfect man of the world who has known princes and peers, priests and peasants; travelled in many lands, seen all works of art, exhausted learning, seen through sin and shams and sorrows, and having seen and digested all, he must laugh at it like a good-natured, large-hearted Mephistopheles. He must have Epistemon and Gymnast and Panurge to make merry with and recal golden memories of that painted wine-cellar of Chinon; that lordly banquet given by King Francis; those merry nuptials of the Sieur de Basché. All very fine, doubtless, for those who can do it; who have been favored by fortune. And certainly, he who has been thus favored, has done well if he has become a true Pantagruelist. He will be welcome in court and bower; the world will call him a gentleman and a scholar and a right good fellow; and if he becomes an author, there will always be a choice few; eaters of olives and caviare, purchasers of facetiæ at high prices, who will give him a place with Bruscambille, and though his thread of life may be small, he will never die.

But his philosophy dies in the desert and is stifled among simple, vulgar associates. Rabelais believed that he sacrificed to Freedom when he simply worshipped Fortune. Listen to the dismal plaint of Machiavelli, whom I verily believe to have been like all great men of the world, something of a Pantagruelist, when shut up in a low country inn, far from books, with no company save a coarse tavern-keeper! No, until glorious Nature, until every source of true pleasure is exhausted or made to minister to him, until humanity in all its phases is ever deeply interesting, the philosophy of Joyousness is not learned. Physical and mental health must be constantly sought in all their purity as zealously as ever alchemist sought the elixir vita; all that can minister to

Thought, or awaken the subtle appetite of intellectual interest, must be grasped as if gold; and last of all, love must be followed believingly through life, be we where we may, and there must be no despair at deceit and no sighing over the past.

Was Sterne truly joyous? When Sterne does not follow his French prototype; when he is not goblinly grotesque for the very sake of grotesquerie; when he is not running over with amiable kindness for every thing which approaches him, what is he, and what remains? A tender, delicate, ornamental pathos the one art-feeling of his age —very pleasant, indeed, to sop our soul in; it was, in fact, the same with which the Sterne trout is properly served; but when the reading is over, do we arise strengthened like a giant from wine? Really, I find in Sterne less practical life-philosophy than in Rabelais. I find no stimulant to joyous, healthy action, no creative impulse awakened, no desire to be up and doing something which shall improve the world, and certainly no eager zeal to make sorrow less and hope greater. We win, indeed, a certain grace from all that we behold - an amiable Chesterfieldism, which, if acquired, gains us much applause. Yorick and Uncle Toby, ye were indeed dearly lovable souls! but the keenest-edged sorrow may lurk in that sweetness, (it pains me to say so,) and far from strengthening, it rather affords excuse to sit down in the first shady lane and indulge in pleasant melancholy fancies over some child of sorrow who comes wandering by. And when finally pressed down into pathos, far as Nature permits, up flies the spring with a wild jerk, and quivers with some thrilling, exquisitely humorous extravagance. All touching, all very funny, all very ingenious, but not joyous or healthy. Would you test what I have said? Read Sterne for an hour, and then take up some true old Roman or Greek poet who knew nothing of these later-day sentimentalisms and fancies of feeling. How the wild boar's sides brush the dew from the leafy covert, how the violets spring freshly up to meet the sun-light on the mountainside, how the well-decked skiffs ride over the foam, while sea-nymphs look up through blue waves. Ay, how flamens and lictors and solemn processions sweep through the columned streets of Rome; how the horses, with towering necks and slender legs, 'haggard-browed, wide-mouthed, wide-nostrilled,' champ and foam; how the girl Erotion peers from the window at the sight:

'HER locks are tipped with ruddy gold,
Like wool that clothes the Bætic fold,

Like braided hair of girls of Rhine;'

and in short, how all is real and earnest and strong, and drawn straight and short from Nature. There we have it. In that direct Roman simplicity; in that freshness uncontaminated by sentiments and mysticism, (be it of the cloister or the parlor,) I find a joyousness which bears me to a purer and nobler life. Then I hear the horn ringing in the forest, the train of gay revellers sweeps once more merrily around me, I am lost again in the beauty which really is, and the poison-breathing, misty ghosts vanish hilariter!

Or Swift! An immense amount of laughter, doubtless, is there in Swift; but I would as soon class Jeremiah or the author of 'Groans from the Bottomless Pit' among joyous writers as the Irish Dean. Humor was most truly his,

and if the reader be one of those who stickles for the distinction between wit and humor, we must grant him wit too. Oh! the wild, uproarious laughs that I have had in by-gone days from those diabolical pages, where every vice and folly and meanness known to the human heart crawled along, stripped of every rag, reduced to such an awfully absurd parody of every self, that I paused at times in very amazement at the fearful power of genius. The savage terrors of Salvator Rosa and the tatterdemalion deviltry of Callot, mingled with a certain colossal creative energy, as of Michael Angelo, in Swift, and the result was an awful picture of Pandemonium where the devils were half-fools. Had Swift been a German scholar, or one familiar with the Macaronic, Teutonic, Latin, facetious literature which swept like a flood over the Fatherland during the Reformation, I should believe that he had deeply studied those irresistibly droll but savage satires in which such writers as Murner and Von Hutten and Bebel and Frischlin lashed each other, and, with their foes, all mankind. Some of it had unquestionably reached him. There had been English editions of the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum and its usual attendant tracts; and of these Martinus Scriblerus, at least, was a legitimate descendant. The bitter sneer, the Jack Pudding jesting on all coarse things, the gross ridicule of women, did not come from Rabelais, from whom some would derive most of Swift's imitation — but much of it may have come from these gross, jolly, halfmonkish revellers who cut the world to pieces with right good will, because they or their teachers had taken vows against it.

They had their mission, and they fulfilled it. Those who advocated an enlarged sphere of learning, profane poetry, liberty of thought, Greek and brother Reuchlin, had the best of it, and broad humor and ribald wit aided them not a little. We of the present day, who know the history of the Reformation principally from the pulpit, and believe that it marched along solemnly and purely as the discourse of the Reverend Jonadad Humdrum, with as little admixture of profanity and worldliness, have a very narrow view, of that great movement. It was not entirely by piety and prayers and 'conviction' that such merry sinners as the Queen of Navarre and her jovial band of poets and gallants were brought to look with aristocratic, well-bred scorn on monkery, bad Latin and ignorance. The multitude might cry, 'Down with Popery!' but their wellmodulated voices exclaimed: 'Up with Poetry!-up with it into a purer, fresher, freer region.' Neither was it by piety alone that the wandering, dissolute scholars and rough-and-tumble multitude were converted. nothing now-a-days of the vagabonds who lent us their aid in that great battle, (we only own the cousins who have grown rich and respectable,) but he who turns over divers little and great satires of that time, finds that the Protestants had their own jolly mud-slingers, too—their own desperate throwers of smut. Those letters to Master Ortwein of Cologne did as much in their time as any other book to ridicule monkhood. But there are not many Protestant clergy of the present day who would commend them. The fact is, that the Reformation reformed more than we suppose. It was a great general upheaving and a progress in freedom of thought of every kind. The popes had already given it efficient aid by a grand revival in Art, by a semi-classic saturnalia; and when

We say

the world acquires new ideas in Art, or furbishes up old ones with a 'Renaissance,' so that they look well, other advances in other matters are sure to follow.

These humorists of the Reformation were jolly, yet not entirely joyous; though with their brother Rabelais, they had much of the true spirit. But Joyousness was not their mission, any more than it was that of Swift or Sterne. And here, reader, I must once for all enter a most earnest protest, and record my solemn disclaimer against being thought to ever so indirectly or faintly say aught against the humorists, satirists and merry brethren of the olden time, because I conceive the possible existence of a gladder and healthier tone of mind than that which they inspired. Every thing has its time, and history is a series of developments. All those of whom I speak fought like brave knights in their time in the cause of suffering humanity; for the right, for the new, for the true, against petrified old forms, tyranny and the devil. Honor to them all! Some have passed away to silent graves, some are decried by the Ortweins and Pfefferkorns of this day as dissolute, filthy revellers. But they were brave soldiers in their time, slashing right and left with a good will, and your cause, my dainty Master Cream Cheese, would have prospered but indifferently had it not been for their aid.

Joyousness must be one of the last, not first, developments of progress. The writers of whom I have spoken dealt in wit and satire and humor; 'Joyousness' deals in infinitely more. Mirth and laughter are all very well, but they are not all in all. Happiness requires more than a well-balanced Rabelaisian nonchalance in adversity and keen relish for all pleasure. Health of body, minds educated to the Beautiful as well as the Useful, scorn of lies in all shapes—all of these are in Joyousness, and these point to a coming generation and its training. I have said nothing of the cosmopolite spirit and the freedom from hateful petty provincial prejudices. Thank HEAVEN, the world is providing for itself in these particulars, and every rail-road laid down is a new avenue to spiritual freedom. The wide, beautiful world of seas, cities, mountains and forests, of many nations and of many ages! Happy the man who feels that he belongs to them all!

Of all writers, Heine, who combined the keen sensuousness of Rabelais with the persiflage of Voltaire, and added to these a mingled elixir drawn from every English, French and German wit and humorist, has, after all, the least claim to be regarded as one teaching a truly joyous philosophy. Intoxicated with the pure, healthy wine of Greek art, free of the world, daring to love all things lovable, genial and good, he had one drawback. The poisonous and sickening, though sweet drug of romanticism had been mingled with his Greek wine, and its result was a slow fever of sentimentalism. Those morbid fancies, those agonies of the heart, serpent-like eating itself, those complacent boasts of the immensity of his own misery-what are they all but the after-clang, the vibrating discord of the old, romantic tune played on harps of the Middle Ages? It is to Heine's credit that he thoroughly analyzed his own disease, and perfectly understood it. He knew that he had grown up in a generation whose enthusiasm and art was a revival of Gothic spirit, and whose poetry was all

inspired by Romance, by the excitement of feelings most foreign to our daily life, and habitual associations. The Greek knew nothing better than that which he himself was, and admired no beauty so much as that which he had himself created. The nineteenth century world, and especially the German portion of it, admired, and still admires, nothing so much as that which is foreign to it, and especially that which comes from the days of mailéd knight and high-born ladye. That this antiquarian, romantic spirit has been wakened for a good purpose, and to preserve for future ages relics and material of the olden time, I have never doubted. But its PRESENT evil, or painful effect, on us is manifest. Our poor devil of an age dwells in the rakings and scrapings of dead architectures, 'in the Composite style,' raises pre-Raphaelite, pre-Gothic, and pre-posterous schools from their graves, and fills libraries and museums with what has been. The result of the Romantic has been the Sentimental, and sentimentalism and suffering go hand in hand.

Tieck, one of the first apostles of the modern Romantic school, or of revived Mediævalism, has very naturally taken pains to show, that what most deeply interests in art must be derived from something foreign, from something alien to our daily life and feelings. Hence we find in the vast flood of modern novels, pictures, and poems, a constant yearning after that which is not practically attainable. The most religious, the best-meaning tales set forth extraordinary, thrilling, and melo-dramatic adventures, entirely out of the common course of daily life. The youthful reader longs to become a hero, or a heroine, and grows restless in what is deemed a humdrum, uneventful career. A passion to do something extraordinary and theatrical is awakened. 'Oh! that I were only a count or countess, a Jane Eyre, a pirate, a Florence Nightingale, a missionary, an adventurer, any thing so that it were adventurous and distinguée!' The infinite beauty which Nature sheds every day over this fair world is unappreciated; the pleasures truly within our reach, the delights of the actual, are all lost in this endless craving for romance. The humblest, the most ignorant, the lowest who devour novels, all have their ideals in aristocratic lords, dames, and cavaliers, who sweep along in fine clothes, fighting duels it may be, or sacrificing life and fortune in beautiful devotion and five-act piety; but they are all quite out of the sphere of knitting and daily working. And even where efforts are made to portray domestic life, we still have the 'thrilling adventure,' gossamer damsels, impossible lovers, and set forms of speech. The pictures in our parlors are of Italian peasants, our poets sing of melancholy and lost joys—and what more natural, since the natural result of yearning for that which we cannot realize is despair?

Heine knew that he lived in an age whose art and literature were almost entirely influenced by old-fashioned romance and modern melancholy sentiment; both of them shams, and having nothing in common with the great, growing, tremendously powerful, and eminently practical spirit of the century. What has our earnest, genial materialism of rail-roads and endless inventions to clothe and feed mankind, ventilate their homes, and physic and wash their bodies, to do with these Don Quixote parodies of chivalry? What has health,