signify the most refined and delicate perception of all that is grotesque in human nature, and in this sense has been justly considered as the most incontestable privilege of genius. Wit is the sport that an active mind makes with its knowledge; humour is the giving out to others the original impression as made by the object itself. Wit ranges wide, and collects from the most distant quarters; humour is the result of a more tranquil susceptibility, the harvest of a quiet eye.' Wit combines things apparently the most dissimilar; humour is occupied with things as they are. Wit is the property of the intellect alone; humour requires as well a high cultivation of the affections. An ordinary person may make an occasional witticism; a clever one may write a good comic scene; but to create such a personage as Aguecheek requires, and is the sure test of, the highest qualities of mind.”

The most striking of these papers is one which contains an imaginary letter from Chatterton to his sister, on the evening before his suicide. He bids farewell to her, as he is about to take leave of a world in which he can find nothing to hold him. He tells her that except for the gentle affection of a few like her, who have loved him only out of the goodness of their hearts, which did not perceive how poor a thing he is, he has found no ties with his kind. He is bidden to love his fellow-beings, but if he is to interpret humanity by the only one he knows, - himself, — he must find it not lovable, but despicable. "Take it not to heart that a starved and miserable reprobate, who enjoyed neither the pleasures of this world nor the visions of another, who could protect himself neither from the rack of passion nor from the pangs of sense, should quit a life in which he had become utterly incapable of giving or receiving happiness. Some hand, perhaps his own, has mingled a bitter with the waters; separated again it cannot be; and to turn from them with disgust, is it not pardonable, is it not wise? I shall watch through the night

till the dawn of another day breaks upon me. This intellectual being which I have so often execrated grows precious on the eve of its extinction; as the sun which stood still in heaven that the slaughter of the Amorites might be continued would be beautiful in its setting, even to the remnant of that afflicted host which all day long had cursed its unrelenting light. There seems to be an unusual serenity in the night, and the stars shine with a softer and more spiritual lustre. I feel as I gaze upon them how easy it is for men to persuade themselves of the happiness of future worlds. Fancies all we know nothing. Why do we dare to hope?

-

Why do we stoop to fear?

"I have no aim - then what should gladden me? I have no love-then wherefore should I live?

I have no visions in eternity,

And my own soul is dark and fugitive.

"There rests in me no misanthropic gall,
Nor have I shunned, as some have done, my kind,
But midst the crowd there was not one of all
Who could my struggling sympathies unbind.

"I blame not them

the fault, the guilt is mine,

My discontent breeds ever from within,

And if I now in solitude repine,

It is that others should not hear the din."

The series concludes with a paper on "The Present and the Future," of which these sentences indicate the tone: "The great object of man is, or ought to be, the perfection of his moral character; and although it may be necessary that to be fully convinced of this he should have looked abroad upon the future, yet, the object once recognized, he can only effect it by entrenching himself within the present. . . . Men are taught to expect in some future time, in some distant place, the heaven which they ought to seek now in their own bosoms. .. Let him limit himself to the hour; let him live by the day; let him think honestly and feel honestly now; and it will

soon come that the morrow will take care for itself. With the philosopher, as with the libertine, the present hour is worth all the rest."

The impression which these papers would probably make upon one having no knowledge of their author is that of a disciplined maturity. They show a fine but tempered ardor, and a mingled firmness and delicacy in thought and style. In the letter under the name of Chatterton, skilfully veiled by one and another device of dramatic construction, the writer was expressing the tragic side of his own life. This was a nature exquisitely attuned to beauty, to harmony, to all finest aspirations and desires, but a nature which had not yet found a work to engage its energy, a creed to satisfy its aspirations, or a companionship to fill its heart. He hungered for the society of a kindred spirit, and such spirits are very rarely to be met. Companionship less perfect and ideal might yet have consoled and strengthened him. But he was perpetually drawn apart from those around him by the fascination of an inward life which they could not share; and something like over-refinement held him back from the homely contact with men in every-day experiences, through which a robust nature may penetrate to interior wealth and true comradeship.

But the profound melancholy which is disclosed in this paper should be understood as but one mood or phase of a life which had very different experiences. It was not a miserable, and it was far less a weak, mind that produced these essays, evincing so much of tranquillity, of delight in the sublimities and the humors of the world, of moral soundness and health. Even in the sadness is " Elysian beauty, melancholy grace." He has not come face to face with unveiled Truth, but Truth has breathed into him her own spirit. He has not found the love he craves, but he has grown worthy to be loved. For he has practised well the greatest lesson man can learn the lesson of selfcommand.

Ar twenty years of age, the young man had thus showed himself already no mean proficient in the noblest of arts, and his literary success was sufficient to open to him the society of the scholarly and thoughtful, if he chose to enter there. His brother-in-law, Mr. Weigall, says the Memoir, told in after years, what William Smith did not choose to tell for himself, that John Sterling's father, the "Thunderer" of the "Times," called to congratulate him on the success of his young kinsman, and declared, in his ardent Irish fashion, that "such pure and elegant English had not been written since the days of Addison." He was invited to join the Union Debating Society. "I accompanied him," Mr. Weigall writes in 1873, "more than once to the Union debates. I remember one occasion especially on which John Stuart Mill was in the chair. There were present on that evening Mr. Roebuck, Mr. H. L. Bulwer (afterwards Lord Dalling), Mr. Romilly (the present Lord), Sir Henry Taylor (author of "Philip Van Artevelde "), and William. . . I never on any other occasion heard such an eloquent debate. William spoke

chiefly in reply to Sir H. Taylor with his usual gentleness.'

very forcibly, but not

Here, one would have said, were the omens of an active and distinguished career. The young knight had shown his mettle, not only in letters, but in the manly jostle of debate. He had fallen in company with such strong and promising young spirits as Sterling and Maurice and Mill. Equipped with power of thought, of love, of self-control;

having already won a hearing; with generous companionship at his command, - what was to hinder his playing a stirring part in the leadership of the time?

But he was already under the spell of the enchantress who was to lead him by far different paths from those of stirring leadership. Her name was Solitude. The fascination of his own thoughts perpetually withdrew him from the society of his kind. He was haunted by visions of ideal beauty and questionings about absolute truth. Such themes absorbed and possessed him; they wrapt him away from that homely and matter-of-fact earth on which men are wont to hold intercourse with each other in striving or serving. To those about him he often seemed like one in a dream; while to his own consciousness he was living in a world of intense reality, which yet he felt to be set apart by some strange impalpable barrier from the world of visible realities.

But the life of thought and imagination in the individual tends to cut its own channel of communication with the actual world. That channel is self-expression in literature. "Every reflective man," says William Smith, "may be set down as at heart an author, whether he has yielded or not to the seductive impulse. Some intention, though it may be most vague and remote, to write mingles itself with the efforts of every man who from reading has been taught to think."

There are three productions of William Smith's which date from the period between his twentieth and thirtieth years. Of his first prose work "Ernesto: a Philosophical Romance," his wife tells us that it was written "much about this time apparently soon after "The Wool-Gatherer," but was only published in 1835, as the last volume of "The Library of Romance," edited by Leitch Ritchie. It was with some difficulty, she tells us, that she prevailed upon her husband to give her a copy of this early production, "the very story of which he had