open sky. After a pause, and a brief conference between the seconds, they at length turned to the right, and taking a track ǎcross a little meadow, passed Ham House, and came into some fields beyond. In one of these they stopped.

7. The ground was measured, some usual forms gone through, the two principals were. placed front to front at the distance agreed upon, and Sir Mulberry turned his face toward his young adversary for the first time. He was very pale-his eyes were blood-shot, his dress disordered, and his hair dĭ'sheveled-all, most probably, the consequences of the previous day and night. For the face, it expressed nothing but viölent and evil passions. He shaded his eyes with his hand, gazed at his oppō'nent steadfastly for a few moments, and then, taking the weapon which was tendered to him, bent his eyes upon that, and looked up no mōre until the word was given, when he instantly fired.

8. The two shots were fired as nearly as possible at the same instant. At that instant the young lord turned his head sharply round, fixed upon his adversary a ghastly stare, and, without a groan or stagger, fell down dead.

9. "He's gone," cried Westwood, who, with the other second, had run up to the body, and fallen on one knee beside it. "His blood on his own head," said Sir Mulberry. "He brought this upon himself, and forced it upon me."

10. "Captain Adams," cried Westwood, hastily, "I call you to witness that this was fairly done. Hawk, we have not a moment to lose. We must leave this place immediately, push for Brighton, and cross to France with all speed. This has been a bad business, and may be worse if we delay a moment. Adams, consult your own safety, and don't remain here; the living before the ́dead-good-bye." With these words, he seized Sir Mulberry by the arm, and hurried him away.

11. Captain Adams, only pausing to convince himself beyond. all question of the fatal result, sped off in the same direction, to concert measures with his servant for removing the body, and securing his own safety likewise.-So died Lord Frederick Verisopht, by the hand which he had loaded with gifts and clasped a thousand times; by the act of him but for whom, and others like him, he might have lived a happy man, and died with children's faces round his bed.

12. The sun came proudly up in all his majesty, the noble river ran its winding course, the leaves quivered and rustled in the air, the birds poured their cheerful songs from ěvèry tree, the short-lived butterfly fluttered its little wings; all the light and life of day came on, and amidst it all, and pressing down the grass, whose every blade bōre twenty tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upward to the sky.

DICKENS.

CHARLES DICKENS, the most eminent of modern English novelists, was born in Portsmouth, Eng., Feb. 7, 1812. In his third year, his family removed to London, where he attended good schools, and received a fair education, but never attempted a college course. At the proper age, he was placed as a clerk in a lawyer's office. Though he remained but a brief period, the knowledge he acquired of the law was of great advantage in his subsequent writings. He soon after became reporter for the newspaper press of London, and also contributed original articles, "Sketches by Boz," collected and republished in two volumes in 1836 and 1837. His succeeding works, "Pickwick," "Oliver Twist," and "Nicholas Nickleby," fully established his reputation. His career has been one of almost uniform success. "The Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," and "The Cricket on the Hearth," rank as personal benefits. We regard "David Copperfield" and the "Tale of Two Cities" as fully equal to his earlier productions, if not superior to all his other writings. During the last few years of his life, Dickens won almost as much money and fame as a reader of his own writings, as he ever won by his books. He was a great original genius, borrowing from no other writer, and imitating no one. He has peopled literature with characters as distinct and real as any in history. He died at Gadshill, Kent, his usual residence, June 9, 1870, leaving incomplete his last work, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."

C

SECTION XIV.

I.

60. CHEERFULNESS.

PART FIRST.

HEERFULNESS is a state or mood of mind consisting either in the equilibrium and harmonious inter-action of the mind's powers and passions, or in the sly infusion of humor into the substance of character. Its predominant feeling is one of inward content, complacency, and repose; but its content is not self-content; its complacency is not self-complacency; and its repose has none of that apathetic' negation of all sympathy

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Apathetic (ăp`a thět' ik), void

of feeling; passionless.

3 Ne gā' tion, exclusion.

which we observe in the sleek and selfish serenity of those frilled and lavendered pharisees, who show so much Christian resignation to the misfortunes, and exhibit such ex'emplary fortitude in enduring the miseries-that fall on their neighbors. Its virtues are modesty, hope, faith, courage, charity, love-all those qualities which give beneficence to the heart and comprehensiveness to the brain; which calm inordinate passions, adjust our expectations to our cir'cumstances, moderate the infinitude of selfish desires, and, above all, instill that delicious sense of nearness to the mysterious fountains of joy.

2. Now there seem to be some persons, the favorites of fortune and darlings of nature, who are born cheerful. "A star danced" at their birth. It is no superficial risibility, but a bountiful and beneficent soul that sparkles in their eyes and smiles on their lips. Their inborn geniälity amounts to genius-the rare and difficult genius which creates sweet and wholesome character, and radiates cheer. The thunder-cloud over their heads never darkens their comforting vision of the sunlight beyond. The hard problems which puzzle sadder intellects, and the great bullying miseries which overthrow and trample on mōre despair-ing spirits, never perplex their faith or crush their energies; for, with an insight that acts like instinct, they detect the soul of good hid in the show of evil, and are let into the secret of that sacred alchemy by which patience transmutes calamity into wisdom and power.

3. But this genius of good-nature is perhaps as rare as any other form of genius. Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline; and to attain this, as to attain other blessings, the proverb holds good of "No pains, no gains; no sweat, no sweet." The first aim of such a discipline will, of course, be to implant a desire for the object; to hold up to love and emulation the wise and beautiful and winning content that finds a home in glad and genial spirits; and, especially, to teach that this all-embracing sunniness of soul comes to us by a series of steps, the light gradually gaining on the gloom, until darkness is slowly dispelled by dawn and dawn by day, and we greet the full sunrise at last with exulting pæans.' 1 Pæ'an, among the ancients, a hence, a loud and joyous song; a song of rejoicing in honor of Apollo; song of triumph.

4. Here, however, at the věry thresh'ōld of the subject, and as if to give us the lie, starts up that surly and savage theory of life which connects hopefulnèss with foolishness, and sourly resolves all intelligence into spleen. Here we come plump against that very large, very respectable, and very knowing class of mis'anthrōpes' who rejoice in the name of grumblers—persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin, that they resent ěvèry attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, their chief pleasure in being displeased. Their raven croak drowns all melodies of lark and linnet. Indeed, like Jaques,* "They can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weazel sucks eggs." It is to them we are doubtless indebted for that phrase which includes all our actions and all the circumstances of our being in this world, under the general term of "the concerns of life."

5. Closely connected with this grumbling spirit, though often superior to its baser qualities, is that mood of the mind, made up of pride and dejection, which has been aptly named sulkiness —a bog in which the souls of some men seem to flounder about during the whole term of their lives, with sympathies resolutely shut to all the approaches of kindliness and cheer. There they abide, in the soul's "muggy" weather, "sucking," as Coleridge says, "the paws of their own self-importance," and finding, we may add, but little juice and nutriment therein. The word, and the unamiable mood it expresses, seem both to have had their birth in England.

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6. In our own country, which, with a certain exquisite irony, we are fond of calling the "happiëst" country in the world, we are preserved by our eager, insatiable activity from so stolid a fault as sulkinèss; but this activity, though it may indicate large powers of mind and great energies of will, does not evince their harmonious combination, and the restless and curious spirit of the nation is vexed with the demon of nervous discontent. This discontent, as it affects some persons, is owing to the flood of

new opinions which has been poured into the public mindopinions which satirize the facts of our daily life, without infusing into the will and the moral sentiments the vigor requisite to change them, and demand the exercise of energies which they have not the power to evoke. Hence that fretful impatience with the actual which comes from the union of vague aspiration with feeble purpose-largeness of mental view with limitation of moral power. Such persons should be more, or know less.

7. Another source of individual and national cheerfulness, too often disregarded in our country, is the trained capacity to take pleasure in little things-to bend our whole energies to the progressive realization of moderate but ascending aims-and to regulate those passions of pride, vanity, envy, avarice, and ambition which poison the sources of action. This power of enjoyment proceeds from right ideäs as well as from right sentiments. It evinces that breadth and penetration of understanding by which objects are seen in their real dimensions and natural relations, with the occasional harshness of the truth softened by the sense of beauty and the sense of humor. We then perceive the world as it is, and, what is mōre, we perceive our own modèst place in it; and, in our gratitude for what we have, lose all feeling of discontent for what we have not.

8. But in Aměrica each individual is prone to be more impressed with his deserts than his duties or his capacity to cɔmpass his deserts; and nowhere else is mediocrity subject to such agonies of baffled desire. Our business, driving along through a storm of panics, too often proves to us that "going ahead too fast" reälly means going backward, and is continually producing those desperate pinches in the money-markets in which the debtor's troubled heart stamps on his face that look of ruin, which, to the shrewd banker, says as plainly, "Don't trust me," as his lips say, "Do lend me!" Continually nettled by the failure of our selfish aspirations, we resent as injustice the disappointments of our vanity and greed; and are apt to feel, when foiled in expectations it was foolish to have ever cherished, something of the irritated self-sufficiency of that monarch whom Montaigne' mentions, who, on the sudden death of an only child,

1 Montaigne (mon tan'), a distinguished French essayist, born at the

chateau of Montaigne, Périgord, Feb. 28, 1533, died there Sept. 13, 1589.