cter, is now struggling against the
pressure of a small income in his advancing years. Not to carry this
melancholy list farther,--which might be indefinitely prolonged,--we
close it with the name of Thomas Hood.

But not by contest with realities of life alone have humorists been
saved from temptations to any dangerous levity; great humorists, as we
have said, have generally been earnest men, very grave at heart, and
much that they have written has been tragedy in the guise of irony. All
readers cannot find this out. They cannot see the grief of life beneath
its grin; they cannot detect the scorn or the pity that is hidden in
joke or banter; neither can they always find out the joke or banter that
is covered by a solemn face; and many a sincere believer has been deemed
an atheist because he burlesqued hypocrites with their own gravity.
Numbers judge only by the outside, and never reach the spirit of
writing or of man. They laugh at the contortions of grimace, but of the
mysteries of mind or the pains of heart which underlie the contortions
they know nothing. They snatch their rapid pleasure, and leave unvalued
the worth of him who gives it; they care not for the cost of genius
or labor at which it has been procured; and when they have had their
transient indulgence, they have had all they sought and all that they
could enjoy.

The relation of many to the humorist is illustrated by that of the
doctor, on a certain occasion, to Liston, the celebrated comedian.
Liston was subject to constitutional melancholy, and in a severe attack
of it he consulted a famous physician.

"Go and see Liston," said the doctor.

"I am Liston," said the actor.

And thus the inner soul of a great humorist is often as unrecognized
by those who read him as was the natural personality of Liston by the
doctor.

FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE.

Every man when he first crosses the ocean is a Columbus to himself, no
matter how many voyages by other navigators he may have heard described
or read recorded. Geographies convince only the brain, not the senses,
that the globe is round; and when personal experience exhibits the fact,
it is as wonderful as if never before suggested. You have dwelt for
weeks within one unbroken loneliness of sea and sky, with nothing that
seemed solid in the universe but the bit of painted wood on which you
have floated. Suddenly one morning something looms high and cloudlike
far away, and you are told that it is