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-nothing about them in good working order. "For, in truth, the most fortunate existence has cares enough to make gravity our normal condition." Roland Graeme, in the " Abbot," earnestly assures his vivacious companion, "Ay, but, fair Catherine, there are moments of deep and true feeling, which are worth ten thousand years of liveliest mirth." Melancholy Minna is a fine relief by contrast to laughter-loving Brenda; and it is suggestively told us of the old Udaller, their sire, that he liked his graver damsel better in the walk without doors, and his merry maiden better by the fireside; and that if he preferred Brenda after the glass circulated in the evening, he gave the preference to Minna before noon. So with Molly and Cynthia in "Wives and Daughters :" Molly always gentle, but very grave and silent; Cynthia merry, full of pretty mockeries, and hardly ever silent-only this constant brilliancy became a little tiresome in everyday life, being not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, so much as the "glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confuses and bewilders." The union of what can be harmonized of the two distinctive characters, is sure to be engaging in no ordinary degree. As in the Beryl of George Geith." "You imagine," says Beryl, on one occasion, "because it is necessary to my existence to laugh at people's oddities, that I never feel for their woes. You think, because I have a quick sense of the ludicrous, that I have no eyes for grief. And there you do me an injustice." Such as Beryl will be found to take exception to predominant levity in the masculine gender, after the manner of the fair tenant of Wildfell Hall: "I do wish he would be sometimes serious," she writes of her endeared Arthur: "I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don't mind it now, but if it be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?" Tired out with such companionship, a complainant in one of Lovell Beddoes' tragedies exclaims,

"I'm weary of their laughter's empty din.

Methinks, these fellows, with their ready jests,
Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike
Marriage or death."

Rather than have her uniformly saccharine and smiling, Ben Jonson's Curius avowedly would have his mistress "angry sometimes, to sweeten off the rest of her behaviour."

Sir Walter Scott, in one page of his Diary, noting the breakup of a hilarious group of guests at Abbotsford, adds the avowal, "I am not sorry, being one of those whom too much mirth always inclines to sadness." Even the bright extremes of joy, as Thomas Hood the elder words it, bring on conclusions of disgust :

"There is no music in the life

That sounds with idiot laughter solely;
There's not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy."

Leigh Hunt tenderly tells one of his grandchildren how, when he was a child, and in excessive spirits, his dear mother would sometimes say to him, "Leigh, come and sit down here by me, and let us try to think a little." Better that than riant sans cesse, even for a child. When I was a child, says the apostle, I Thinking was not out of the question even then, though it might, and by comparison with the man's it must, be childish thinking. For children as for men, a time to laugh and a time to weep. gifts and temperaments :

thought as a child.

True, there are differences of

"To some men God hath given laughter; but tears to some men He hath given:

He bade us sow in tears, hereafter to harvest holier smiles in Heaven; And tears and smiles, they are His gift: both good, to smite or to uplift. He knows His sheep the wind and showers beat not too sharply the shorn lamb :

His wisdom is more wise than ours: He knew my nature-what I am : He tempers smiles with tears: both good, to bear in time the Christian

mood."

DISALLOWED DESIGNS.

PROVERBS xix. 21.

nevertheless,

'HERE are many devices in a man's heart; "the the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand." Even the counsels of the prudent He bringeth to nought. "There is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel, against the Lord," Without Him, where is nor any that prospers without Him.

the wise? where is the scribe? What, after all, is the wisdom of the children of this world, wiser in their generation than the children of light? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise." Nay; unworldly wisdom, in its forming of plans, and elaboration of schemes, and devising of devices, enjoys no privileged immunity from failure, at the veto of Him who chargeth His angels with folly. "L'homme propose, Dieu dispose." The Divine disposal of human proposals is ofttimes very summary and entire.

The proverb, "Man proposes, God disposes," is believed by one learned in such lore to be naturalised in every nation of Europe: thus the Spanish, "La gente pone, y Dios dispone;" the German, with its corresponding jingle, "Der Mensch denkt's, Gott lenkt's," etc., so deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of Hamlet's assertion of a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Molière's a truism when reminding shrewd-spoken Dorine enounces Damis that,

"On n'exécute pas tout ce qui se propose;
Et le chemin est long du projet à la chose."

A wise man endeavours, it has been said, by considering all
circumstances, to make conjectures and form conclusions: but
the smallest accident intervening (and in the course of affairs
it is impossible to foresee all) often produces such turns and
changes, that at last he is just as much in doubt of events as
What Shak-
the most ignorant and inexperienced person.
speare in his sonnets calls "millioned accidents" creep in
between design and result, between plan and performance,

between scheme and issue, and "blunt the sharpest intents." As the old moralising poet, modernised by Dryden, puts it

"But see how Fortune can confound the wise,

And when they least expect it, turn the dice."

Fortune, or fate, is the popularly recognised agent in these reversals and collapses; and subtile philosophers speculate curiously on the plenipotent character of this agency. One such, for example, predisposed to paradox may-be, yet no heedless or hasty penman, affirms, that if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end, to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving track. Chance and change, he goes on to remark, love to deal with men's unsettled plans, not with their idle vagaries. So that, as he argues the matter, if we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable shape; for then comes in the unexpected, and shatters our design in fragments.

The biographer of Columbus, narrating the story of his shipwreck in 1492, describes him as passing, with his usual excitability, from a state of doubt and anxiety to one of sanguine anticipation, and thus coming to consider his present misfortune as a providential event mysteriously ordained by Heaven to work out the success of his enterprise. At once, therefore, he began to look forward to glorious fruits to be reaped from this seeming evil, and laid his plans accordingly. "Such was the visionary yet generous enthusiasm of Columbus, the moment that prospects of vast wealth broke upon his mind. What in some spirits would have awakened a grasping and sordid avidity to accumulate, immediately filled his imagination with plans of magnificent expenditure. But how vain are our attempts to interpret the inscrutable decrees of Providence! The shipwreck, which Columbus considered the act of Divine favour, to reveal to him the secrets of the land, shackled and limited all his after-discoveries." For it is shown

to have linked his fortunes, for the remainder of his life, to this island, which was doomed to be to him a source of cares and troubles, to involve him in a thousand perplexities, and to becloud his declining years with humiliation and disappoint

ment.

"Le ciel agit sans nous en ces événements,

Et ne les régle point dessus nos sentiments."

It is instructive to note in the memoirs of Gabriel Naudé, that great scholar's exultant anticipation of the public opening of the library he had mainly helped to form. He must have reckoned on that day as a beau jour for him, the happiest day of his life; and he arranged a fête accordingly, to be celebrated with his most intimate friends. But that very day broke out the public troubles of the Fronde; and barricades in the streets of Paris ill accorded with Gabriel Naudé's cherished hopes. "Ainsi vont les projets humains sous l'œil d'en haut qui les déjoue." The Scotch ploughman-poet, eyeing the mouse and

its " wee bit housie, too, in ruin," as turned up by his plough,

gave racy utterance to but a trite reflection, when, apostrophising the "wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," he thus moralised his song :

"But, mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain :
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley,

And leave us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy."

As the good friar in Shakspeare has it,—

"A greater power than we can contradict

Hath thwarted our intents,"

well laid and discreetly devised as they seemed to be.

And as with the seemingly laudable plans of the prudent, so with the arrogant designs of the self-confident. The enemy said, "I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them." Thus said the enemy, even

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