prompting of this sarcastic and unbridled humour that made him often love to astonish as well as to awe. But even this gaiety, if so it may be called, taking an appearance of familiar frankness, served much to ingratiate him with the lower orders; and if a fault in the prince, was a virtue in the demagogue." The popular leader who will have his laugh out, who must have his joke, is all the more popular with the populace on that account.

With regard to Cromwell, one of the best and most trustworthy records we have, perhaps, of the levity in which he occasionally indulged, is contained in what nominally is a work of fiction, but a work very literally and laboriously founded upon facts, and, in passages like this, relating to the Protector in his mirthful mood, strictly tenacious of wellauthenticated evidence, line upon line, from first to last. Such a work is the late Mr. Leigh Hunt's one achievement in prose fiction, Sir Ralph Esher, whose memoirs involve a most unusual outlay of time and trouble and conscientious care on the part of their author,-the relative ages, for instance, of persons who really existed having been scrupulously calculated by him so as to square with their conduct; no character or event being introduced by him that was not strictly contemporaneous; and no locality even being mentioned in which the persons introduced in it would not be found to have been present on referring to contemporary annals. The second volume of this matter-of-fact romance, then, comprises the autobiography of a certain Sir Philip Herne, who narrates the proceedings at the marriage of Cromwell's daughter Mary to Lord Fauconberg, on the 18th of November, 1657, -the year before the Protector's death. It was expected, according to Sir Philip, that some extraordinary scenes would be mixed up with the gravity of this occasion, Crom

well having, at a previous wedding in his family, "given way to some levities into which he now and then started, to the consternation of his Master of the Ceremonies." Not that they were stranger, though perhaps more violent, than kings have been known to indulge in. "I have heard stranger ones related of James; but perhaps they were looked for in a man of Cromwell's reputation and fortunes; and this may have been one of the reasons why he committed them." For the suggestion is that, not having been born to his state, perhaps occasionally violating some petty formality of it unawares, Oliver may have acted out of a sort of spite to it; or that perhaps his vagaries had something in them of the same hysterical mixture of melancholy and animal spirits, which vented itself at other times in a passion of tears. Or, again, they may have been part of "the simplicity of real greatness, simple in itself, even though condescending to artifice for its purposes; and seeing no reason, at times, why the boy was not as great and wise a thing as the man." Or, once more, they may themselves have been artifices to create confidence and good will, and baffle the gravity of objection. Nor would our authority swear that sometimes a little too much burnt claret had not to do with it.

In the way of exemplification we are then told that Cromwell would break off from the gravest and most pressing discussions, at the signal of an accidental jest, or a passing expression of fatigue, and play and romp like a boy; throwing about the cushions, pulling hair, and having a chase round the council-table. "It is well known that when he and the other regicides were signing the death-warrant, he smeared Ingoldsby's face with the pen, having dipped it too full of ink. This was certainly an hysterical action, and the only one that I could never reconcile to my better notions of

him. It is impossible to conceive any state of feeling, diseased or healthy, which should have been allowed to disturb the decorum of such a moment. Probably it arose from an intense consciousness of his being ignorant how to hit the exact point of behaviour. His inconsequentialities were usually of a pleasanter character. I remember I was present one day when, in the course of a most affecting conversation with Lord Orrery, on the subject of childhood, the Protector suddenly asked him if he could play at leap-frog, and actually had a leap or two with him on the spot; delighting, as he went over the noble lord, to dig his knuckles in his back, and make him groan under the transit."

As another instance of a distinguished potentate who, till we were better informed, would seem to us in the highest degree an unlikely man for ebullitions of mirth, however few and far between, may be named that Prince of Orange, whom, for the apparent absence of anything like this social disposition, men called the Silent, or the Taciturn. His temperament was cheerful, we are expressly assured by the historian of the Dutch Republic. “At table, the pleasures of which, in moderation, were his only relaxation, he was always animated and merry, and this jocoseness was partly natural, partly intentional. In the darkest hours of his country's trial he affected a serenity which he was far from feeling, so that his apparent gaiety at momentous epochs was even censured by dullards, who could not comprehend its philosophy, nor applaud the flippancy of William the Silent." And among the gravest of grave statesmen, in all ages, will be found the same genial capacity for undress joyousness—the same in kind, at least, though varying infinitely in degree and mode of manifestation. One example only will we cite, in the person of the lamented French Minister, M. Casimir Perier, who in

the world was distant, cold, and ill at ease; but to those who knew him intimately, was, in M. de Remusat's phrase, “captivating” and “entertaining,” while in his own domestic circle he was lively and humorous, laughing occasionally with the "joyous burst of youths of another age, and amusing himself with a thousand puerilities of social life, despised at present when the affectation of solemnity is the prevailing fashion of the mind." Horace Walpole at threescore and ten writes to the Countess of Ossory his extreme approval" of her good humour in dancing and acting at Ampthill, for he should hate gravity, dignity, or austerity, he protests, in one's own house in the country. "Who had not rather see Scipio playing at leap-frog with his children at his Ampthill, than parading to St. Paul's to sing 'Te Deum'?" And has not that contemporary of Walpole's, who ranks first among our religious poets, thus rhymed and reasoned :

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He will not blush that has a father's heart,

To take in childish plays a childish part,

But bends his sturdy back to any toy
That youth takes pleasure in, to please his boy.

IV.

About Indefinable Boundary-Lines.

A VEXED QUESTION.

THE

HE insoluble problem of definitely declaring where one thing ends and another begins-of drawing the exact line at which they merge and mingle—of accurately determining where they interpenetrate, and lose their individual entity, is a very Proteus in the diversity of forms in which it is constantly eluding our grasp, and as constantly turning up again on some new ground, reproducing itself under some new conditions, reasserting its immunity from capture in some new guise.

In theology, in ethics, in natural philosophy, in physiology, in political science, everywhere the vexata quæstio remains vexanda. Very small boys at school, just beginning their Paley, can enter into the difficulty of deciding, what doctors cannot do, the degree of difference in worth of character between the worst (that is to say the least good) man that is saved, and the best (that is the least bad) man that is lost. And as with Paley's puzzle, so with cognate ones of indeterminable limits in every province of speculative inquiry. As with the junction-line between light and darkness, between night and morning (which, by the way, Lady Macbeth sug