miles and tears, is
no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's.

WORN-OUT TYPES.

It is now a complaint of quite respectably antiquity that the types in
which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are
worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become
smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief--it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so
it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We
have tempers, it is true--bad ones for the most part; but no humours to
be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we
only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A
cheerfully-disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the
prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need
not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression
to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that
mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take
cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character
there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is
impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the
argument further by inquiring ingenuously, 'And how would that matter?'
the position of things becomes serious, and demands a few minutes'
investigation.

As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one--most complaints
are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he
was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have
been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this
curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that
most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows:

'It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize
and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education
and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from
the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we
learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike,
mere readers--spectators, not actors in the scene and lose all proper
personal identity. The templar--the wit--the man of pleasure and the
man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the
squire, the lover and the miser--Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb
and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparki