all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a Drawing-room: and a West-end clergyman is with difficulty restrained from telling his congregation what he had been told the British workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force-so unusual in such a place; but he had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries-not of State, but of companies-speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to many— indeed, playing a great part among us-but who, for all that, have not enriched the stage with a single character. Where they to disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Shelley's west wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity encounter them? Alone amongst the children of men the pale student of the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the 'high lonely towers' recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth. over that interminable series, The Law Reports, every now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of

justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive interest in such matters.

'Not one except the Attorney was amused—
He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,

So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,
Knowing they must be settled by the laws.'

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have

'Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,

Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee '?

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder-Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to con

fess that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the dramatis personæ of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warmhearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man ; but we laugh because we will, and not because we

must.

Genuine comedy--the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul- rejoicing incongruity has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; he is a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly.

6

Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be cross-gartered'; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities-what we call his 'ways'-nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. 'But 'indeed,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'we die many deaths 'before we die, and I am almost sick when I think 'that such a hold as I had of you is gone.'

Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual, not the type; and though the young man in Locksley Hall no doubt observes that the 'individual withers,' we have but to take down George Meredith's novels to find

the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio: 'Thou hast hit it; come sit on me.' No doubt the task of the modern humourist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out-stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize but what would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities.

observe, 'in a "No wings!

If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, 'Why can we not fly, my friends?' Mr. Snagsby ventured to cheering and rather knowing tone, but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed movements of Our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar.

CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS.

WHY

HY all the English poets, with barely a decent number of exceptions, have been Cambridge men, has always struck me, as did the abstinence of the Greeks from malt Mr. Calverley, 'as extremely 'curious.' But in this age of detail, one must, however reluctantly, submit to prove one's facts, and I, therefore, propose to institute a Modest Inquiry' into this subject. Imaginatively, I shall don proctorial robes, and, armed with a duster, saunter up and down the library, putting to each poet as I meet him the once dreaded question, 'Sir, are you a member of 'this University?'

But whilst I am arranging myself for this function, let me utilize the time by making two preliminary observations-the first one being that, as to-day is Sunday, only such free libraries are open as may happen to be attached to public-houses, and I am consequently confined to my own poor shelves, and must be forgiven even though I make some palpable omissions. The second is that I exclude from my survey living authors. I must do so; their very names would excite controversy about a subject which, when wisely handled, admits of none.