ality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a
jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is
conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with
confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which
remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, surprise
nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy
ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set
every one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had
been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little
fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes
comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now
to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this
encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to
pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal
largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better
thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of
goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had
been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the
forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they
practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.
Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger
and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and, within practical
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of
Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of
activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a
leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a
contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper
before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works,
this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be
happier if he were dead. They could easier do