ment. Against one or two of the more modern culprits, Dickens in particular, there is a second charge, to wit, that they did remove, crush, drive into obscurity, and totally eclipse the Eau Sucrée School of novelists, whose works had for a long time formed an intellectual repast, both grateful and suitable to minds of delicate organization. In them were to be found no dull descriptions of every day life, in coarse every day language, no character was open to the objection Mr. Partridge brought against Garrick's acting.* No hero held a lower position in society than a Viscount, or at least an amiable cutthroat, who, to make up for the laxity of his morals, expressed himself like a Chesterfield, and had the manners of any polished gentleman, say, George the Fourth, and who, when it became a necessary to abduct the heroine (Lady De' &c. &c.) performed that duty with engaging suavity, and removed her to his private dungeon to be kept till called for in the third volume, when the hero had satisfactorily proved himself to be the son and heir of the Marquis. It is easy to understand that persons who admire this style, as emphatically the genteel, may feel a sublime contempt for works of fiction, in which the characters, many of them drawn from low life, are represented as speaking and acting just as people in their position might be expected to speak and act, and in which dialogues given in the dull monotony of the vernacular, and unrelieved by scraps of French, Italian, or any foreign language, have often a tendency to produce laughter, and other external symptoms of enjoyment; but it is by no means easy to comprehend what are their notions of vulgarity, so gutta-percha-like in its own elasticity, and extensive in its application, does that word become, when used by them in reference to anything which is unfortunate enough not to meet their approbation.† They seem to forget that vulgarity is a quality, not inherent, but altogether dependant on circumstances, and that words and phrases, which may be vulgar in some positions, are not necessarily always so. For instance, it would be undeniably vulgar for an author in describing the parting between Mr. William Styles, and John Noakes, to say, "they wet their whistles, and then

"He the best actor," cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer, "Why I could act as well as he myself; I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did." Tom Jones, Book 16. Chapter 5.

† Sir Walter Scott used to say, "nothing is vulgar that is not vicious."

bolted;" but he might represent either of those gentlemen as using the same figurative expressions in his own account of the effecting event, without violating propriety, in any sense of the word, more than the author of " Adela, or the Outlaw of Oxfordshire" does, when he makes his heroine dismiss her lover, with the assurance that "poverty and contempt she could endure with him, but a father's anger, a parent's wrath she cannot, will not, &c." Of course there are many expressions in use among the lower orders, which no circumstances could render fit to appear in print, but vulgarity is altogether too weak a word to express the offence of any man, who would so far forget his duty to society, as to introduce such as these into his writings. In short propriety, as well in representing naturally, as in avoiding what is of itself offensive, is perhaps the surest guide the Novelist can have. As long as he keeps this landmark in view, he will steer clear of vulgarity or coarseness, even though his Styles's and Noakes's speak with all the idiomatic terseness of their class; unless indeed the objection be deemed a valid one, which those, whose refinement is of extra delicacy, have to the appearance on any terms whatever, of such characters in a picture of life; but as the prototypes are to be found in the original, it is probable that most persons will be content to join us in lamenting that at the outset, the organization of society was not entrusted to people, who would have no doubt, given us a world of ladies and gentlemen. As we have already stated; it is to be feared that the title under which the subject of the present notice is published, will be damnatory in the eyes of this class, that designates as vulgar everything outside the Drawing-room door; yet, if our recommendation have any weight, we would suggest a perusal however slight, if it were only for the purpose of correcting a mistake, to which the devotees of sublimated gentility, are of all people, most prone, namely, that, the humour of our transatlantic cousins never showsitself in any other form than those facetious anecdotes usually charged upon American papers, of men so tall, that they are obliged to climb a ladder to comb their own hair, or of ghosts of such preternatural brightness as to render smoked glass indispensable to all who may wish to contemplate them. As to our utilitarian friends, deference to their lofty, though prejudiced minds, renders it impossible for us to recommend a work of such levity as Judge Haliburton's, on any other grounds than that many of the

sketches of domestic life contained in its pages, may add something to their stock of "useful knowledge" concerning Social America. It is true, that the tendency of humour is to place its object in a state of inferiority, so as to cause laughter, but it does not follow that the inferiority is necessarily such as to excite the feeling of contempt; to delineate harmless peculiarities and good-natured simplicity, is just as much the province of humour, as to expose the less amiable failings; no doubt the pleasure we derive from the consideration of the clearness of those two great parallels in fiction, "My Uncle Toby," and Mr. Pickwick, arises in a great measure from a sort of self-congratulation, at being unencumbered with their excess of simple benevolence, but the mind that could DESPISE those worthy creatures, must be of a very unloving and unloveable cast; when humour takes this turn, the inferiority does not pervade the whole conception; it is then merely a lowering of one part to throw another into relief, as the wood engraver reduces the surface of the block, where the lines traced on it are meant to be subordinate. There would be nothing humorous in uncle Toby's widely extended philanthropy and tenderness of heart, unaccompanied by his bashfulness and childlike enthusiasm about the art of war, or in the intense bonhomie of Mr. Pickwick, were it not for the little traits of credulity, pompous simplicity, and occasional quickness of temper which render that dear man such a delightful study. Nor is it essential that the part of the conception thus thrown into relief should be of an amiable nature; our admiration for Falstaff, with all his wit and philosophy, is of a much less kindly description than that inspired by uncle Toby, yet, in spite of his sensibility and cowardice, we are far from feeling contempt for him as we do for Dogberry. In fact this species of humour represents certain qualities in a ludicrous light, not so much thus to excite laughter, as to supply a foil for others, which would, of themselves, excite admiration rather than laughter; and hence arises that incongruity which forms the essence of the humourous. Of a far different nature is the incongruity which causes our enjoyment of humour, when it has for its object, the peculiarities of a nation, or class, of which we ourselves are not members, it then springs from our mentally contrasting the manners, habits, dialect, or whatever the immediate subject may be, with our own. But this is not all; there is nothing humorous in the idea of a party of Cannibal

Islanders dining off a grilled enemy, although the contrast between such a repast and a European family dinner, is about as great as can be well conceived; there must be also a certain amount of that unusual combination of circumstances, incidents, or objects, which would render the representation humorous, irrespectively of its origin or locale, or in other words, what, speaking metaphysically, we might call an internal incongruity. The latter is of course just as perceptible to an individual of the particular class or nation, and our enjoyment of it proceeds from a feeling of temporary superiority to, or a sort of contempt for the object humorously treated. We may here remark, that this contempt is by no means identical with the feeling which our dictionaries, explain by the words "scorn;" certain words such as "pleasure," " pain," "delight," "congruity," acquire a conventional meaning in metaphysics, from being always used in their most abstracted sense, and perhaps, one of the greatest difficulties the student in that science has to encounter, is the training his mind to use that conventional meaning, and forget for the time being, the more ordinary one. To return to our more immediate subject, as we of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland have an additional source of enjoyment in Judge Haliburton's "Traits of American Humour," besides that which we have in common with his readers on the other side of the Atlantic, and as the work itself, being a collection of American sketches, written by American authors, has issued from an English press, and is published by an English firm, it may be considered as doing double duty; first, as a work illustrative of the manners, the domestic life, and the various provincial dialects, as well as of the humour of the Americans, and secondly, as a book of that sort which one takes up simply for amusement. It's efficacy in the former capacity will, we know, be doubted by a class of readers we have already alluded to; the sticklers for the solid and serious will scout the idea of a humorous work, containing useful information regarding any country, and undoubtedly they are right in doing so, if they consider useful information to consist exclusively in statistics of births, deaths, marriages, gaol-deliveries, and prison discipline, or in lists of exports, imports, public buildings, and capital offenders. If to be well "made up" in such matters, is to know a nation thoroughly, then humour, which has ever had a rooted antipathy to the blue books and figures, can avail but little. But we would respect

fully (as dealing with persons of such severe taste) submit that something more is necessary. Which of us would think of establishing an intimacy with a person whose friendship was desirable, by finding out the name of his tailor, or the sum to his credit in the 3 per cents, if we admired the cut of his coat, or had a marriageable daughter?-information on these points would be no doubt very acceptable; but if he were a man for whom we felt respect, apart from that inspired by his paletot, or his pocket, it is propable we should feel just as much curiosity about his tastes and habits, whether he was the same, in an arm-chair and slippers, by his own fireside, as he was in public, whether he was sociable or morose, playful or austere to his own family, whether it was he who kept the household in order, or the grey-mare was the better horse in his home circle. If information on points like these assist us in forming a just estimate of individual character, surely the study of the corresponding problems in national character has it claims to utility, especially in the case of such a nation as America, a nation which with all her weak points, we cannot but respect (we do not use the word in a diplomatic sense). A nation which still feels, and it is to be feared not without cause, a certain amount of jealousy and heart-burning towards her progenitor, while every day shows that something more than a mere speaking acquaintance is desirable. Although a small library might be furnished exclusively with books on American subjects, yet of what may be called Social America, of the manners, ways of thinking, fireside chit-chat of the middle (for democratic as she is, America has a middle) class, we as yet know little or nothing. The "Dots" and "Peerybingles" of England have become "Household Words" in many a home between New York and New Orleans, but, though no doubt the cricket chirps just as loudly on the American hearth, as it does among the coal or turf-ashes of our two "right little, tight little islands," its voice has not come across the Atlantic. The native authors seldom give us a view of domestic life. The witty Clockmaker of Slickville, himself, avowes a preference for political or metaphysical disquisition, and the sojourns of foreign writers on America, have been generally too limited to allow them to acquire the necessary intimacy with the people, even supposing they had not travelled, as too many obviously have, only to collect evidence to prove some pet theory respecting the evils of democracy; there are few descriptions of American life or