of a Sicilian Prince who exclaimed, "Respect for Property is the foundation of the Universe." Monsieur Taconet built on these faces a charming romance where elective affinities played an important part; an imbroglio wherein hearts and hands "circulated." Then he began (Conclusion in next Journal.)

to ponder on inferior races, and upon those nations which hold the secrets of the future, on Germanic synthesis-and upon Sedan. And, finally, he thought of the red-skins-and ended by murmuring, half aloud, "Patience!' answered Panurge." VICTOR CHERBULIEZ.

DR.

R. JOHNSON is not generally supposed to have erred as a critic on the side of excessive approbation. And yet he managed to bestow upon one book the most forcible eulogium ever uttered. Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" was, he said, the only book which ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he intended. The compliment is always reproduced when Burton's book is mentioned. Second-hand booksellers judiciously quote it in their catalogues to stimulate the appetite of their customers. Every lover of books has been induced to prolong his evening sitting, sometimes to prolong it till daylight, by the charms of a fascinating author; but the most voracious of literary gluttons seldom breaks his morning slumbers under such an impulse. And, when we add that it was Johnson who was thus beguiled, Johnson whose whole life was a continuous remorse for inability to rise early, when we see that Burton must have done for once what could be done neither by strong religious principles, nor by a morbidly keen conscience, nor by the pressure of stern necessity, and what the united energies of Boswell and the Thrales and the whole of the Club would have failed in securing, we must admit that the performance borders on the incredible. Doubtless it was the youthful Johnson whose slumbers he disturbed; and it was after the scanty fare of Lichfield, not the solid festivities of the "Mitre" or the "Turk's Head." With all deductions, we are still in presence of a "great fact." Many a young student must have turned with avidity to the promised treat, and a good many have probably retreated in disappointment. For, at first sight, the reader becomes aware of the curious mildness of another phrase of Johnson's; the book, he said, is "perhaps overloaded with quotations." That is rather like saying that Pickwick may "perhaps" be regarded as aiming at fun; that there is possibly a dash of humor in Charles Lamb; or that Pope may be accused of a tendency to satire. The "Anatomy" is all but made up of quotations; it is, as the author ex

pressly says, a “cento collected from others"; a vast heterogeneous mass of miscellaneous reading; the contents of a commonplace-book kept by a reader of boundless curiosity who has ranged over the whole field of learning then accessible, from the classical authors down through the fathers and the scholastic philosophers of the middle ages, to the grammarians, philosophers, physiologists, and novelists of the Renaissance, and who has dipped into the most fashionable playbooks, poems, and essays of the day-Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Drayton, and even Ben Jonson and Shakespeare.* It is a patchwork stuck together with scissors and paste, a queer amorphous mass, in spite of its ostensible plan, where we are half-baffled and half-attracted by references to strange authors who delighted in masquerading with Latin terminations to their names. We have heard more or less of some of them, of Bodinus and Paracelsus, or Cardan, or Erasmus; but who, we wonder, was Rlasis the Arabian, or Skenkius, or Poggius, or Fuchsius, or Busbequius †—a name which has no doubt a peculiar flavor of pleasant quaintness? Such names carry with them a faint association of the days of high-built and ponderous pedantry; we catch a passing glimpse of some ancient doctor damning another for his theory of the irregular verbs, or settling the theory of the enclitic de, or conducting tremendous disputations in the schools with all the ponderous apparatus of the old syllogistic artillery. Yet it is possible to have too much of Busbequius; and, after dipping into the book, in search of that spirit and power which he is said (still by Johnson) to display when writing

* Shakespeare is noticed at least twice; in a reference to Benedick and Beatrice in the comedy, and a quotation from "Venus and Adonis."

+ Busbecq, or Busbequius, was in fact a distinguished diplomatist in the sixteenth century; he went to Constantinople and wrote travels, and, according to the lilac from Turkey. There is a full article about him in "Biographie Universelle," was the first to introduce the Bayle. Possibly his name has a scholastic flavor to us from a vague association with the famous Dr. Busby.

from his own mind, it is well if we do not give up the chase in despair, and decide that it is hardly worth cracking so vast a shell of effete pedantry to come at so small a kernel of sound

sense.

It is well, I say; for after all there is a real charm in the old gentleman. Certainly the "Anatomy" is not a book to be read through; it would have no place in the short list of literary masterpieces which the intelligent reader is supposed to absorb into his mental structure. It is a book for odds and ends of time, and to be read only at appropriate seasons; not, perhaps, in a railway-carriage or by the seaside, or in any place where the roaring wheels of our social machinery make themselves too plainly heard. It is rather a book to be taken up in a quiet library, by accident, not of malice prepense, and, in spite of Johnson, rather in the last hour of the night than at morning. When you are tired of blue-books or scientific wrangling or metaphysical hair-splitting; when you have turned to the last book from the circulating library only to discover that novel-writing is a forgotten art; that poetry has become a frivolous echo of sounding verbiage; that the smartest mazagine article is a mere pert gabble of commonplace-jaundiced views which sometimes suggest themselves on such occasions-it may be pleasant to soothe yourself by entering this old museum of musty antiquities, and to feel as though you were entering a forgotten chamber where the skeletons of seventeenth-century spiders are still poised upon undisturbed cobwebs. The phantoms of Busbequius and his fellows may then have substantiality enough to hold converse with you for a time, and you gradually perceive that old Burton himself probably once filled an academical costume with a genuine structure of flesh and bone. Carefully as he retires behind his moth-eaten folios, there are moments when he drops his disguise, and you can depict the quaint smile of the humorous observer of men and manners, and believe that he had in his days a genuine share of the pathetic side of human folly. Nobody, it is true, is more provokingly shy. It is the shyness of the genuine old-fashioned scholar, who is halfashamed of possessing tissues not made out of an ancient parchment. You ask him for an opinion, and he throws a dozen authorities at your head and effects his es ape into an ingenious digression; he balances himself in curious equilibrium between the ranks of opposing doctors, and only lets slip at intervals an oblique intimation that he is inclined to think that one of them is a donkey. In all this he is certainly as different as possible from the ordinary humorist. He requires an interpreter, and must be cross-examined to make him yield up his real meaning; VOL. VIII.-33

and yet, under all his concealments, he has a certain vein of shrewd humor which may at least serve to excite such a portion of that faculty as we may ourselves happen to possess.

Burton, in his opening address to the reader, sets forth his claims to the title of Democritus junior; and he tells at length the legend of the laughing philosopher; how the citizens of Abdera took him to be mad by reason of his excessive perception of the ludicrous, and brought the weeping Hippocrates to cure him of his folly; how Hippocrates found him sitting on the ground cutting up beasts to find out the causes of melancholy; and how, when Hippocrates tried to point out that reasonable citizens employed themselves upon business or pleasure instead of dissection, Democritus answered every argument by peals of laughter and demonstrations of the utter absurdity of all the ordinary activities of man. So clearly did Democritus preach upon the old text, Vanity of Vanities, that Hippocrates departed with the fullest conviction of his sanity. Burton proposes to continue the discourse of Democritus. Never, he says, was there so much food for laughter as now; for now, "as Salisburiensis says in his time, totus mundus histrionem agit, the whole world plays the fool; we have a new theatre, a new scene, a new comedy of errors, a new company of personate actors; Volupiæ sacra (as Calcagnius willingly feigns in his Apologius') are celebrated all the world over, when all the actors were madmen or fools, and every hour changed habits, or took that which came next." The world is a farce; princes are mad; great men are mad; philosophers and scholars are mad, and so are those who scorn them. "Methinks," he says, "most men are fools," if we may apply the judicious tests given by Æneas Sylvius. "Nevisanus, the lawyer, holds it for an axiom, most women are fools; Seneca, men, be they old or young; who doubts it, youth is mad as Elius in Tully, stulti adolescentuli; old age little better, deliri senes.” And, after running through as many classes as he can think of, Burton confesses that he is himself as foolish and as mad as any one. We are tolerably familiar with the theory, "All the world is a stage," and the players are "mostly fools." Satirists and poets and moralists and essayists have set the same sentiment to different times; and it is the special function of the humorist to give fresh edge to the ancient doctrine. Burton has certainly chosen a thesis which affords ample room for the widest illustration; and we have only to ask how he acquits himself of his task.

And here we perceive that he begins to shrink a little. Some people, he says, will think his performance "too fantastical, too light and comical for a divine"; and he replies that he is

only speaking an assumed part, and collecting the opinions of others. "'Tis not I, but they that say it." You must blame Nevisanus and Calcagnius for the startling theory just expounded, not the Rev. Richard Burton, student of Christ Church, and Rector of Segrave. He trembles at his own audacity, and retires behind his mask. And, as he carries out this principle only too systematically, he is a humorist only by proxy. He does not let us see what he feels himself; he is not a mere buffoon, for we are not sure that he has no serious meaning; but he does not rise to be a daring humorist, for he is afraid ever to laugh out. We often fail to discover whether he is slyly laughing in his sleeve or advancing some preposterous doctrine in honest reverence for the authority upon which it rests; whether his elaborate pedantry is really part of himself or a mere mask which he knows to be really grotesque. We follow Montaigne with the sense that we are talking to a man of vigorous intellect, who reads books as they ought to be read by a full-grown thinker; who treats them as an equal or a superior; and quotes them to illustrate his own thoughts, not as providing unalterable molds to which his thoughts are bound to conform. But that is just the point which Burton leaves doubtful. Is he really half in fun when he quotes a dozen learned men to prove that disease or poverty may be a cause of melancholy; or is he distinctly aware that the learned men are indulging in ludicrous platitudes; or perhaps simply turning out his commonplacebook to show his learning?

That is the curious problem which haunts us through the whole performance. The man was no doubt a puzzle to his contemporaries, as he remains for us. The view which they took of him is typified in the two or three anecdotes which do duty for his biography, doubtless more or less apocryphal, as such anecdotes invariably are, and yet perhaps as significant of the truth as the most authentic narratives. Burton, as Wood tells us, was very "facete, merry, and juvenile" among his college companions, and no man could surpass him (as we may easily believe) at interlarding his discourse with appropriate quotations, according to the fashion of the time. He meant, it is said, to cure himself of a tendency to melancholy by compiling the "Anatomy"; but melancholy increased his weakness so much that at last he could only relieve himself by listening to the ribaldry of the Oxford bargees, an amusement which "rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter." Burton, no doubt, had the true humorist's temperament; a disposition to melancholy underlay his perception of the ludicrous, and this disposition might be fostered by a sedentary life and advancing years, till, tired

of hunting for literary curiosities, he returned to the coarse brutalities of waterside buffoonery, as the sated epicure ends by finding the highest relish in simple beans and bacon. He died, we are told, at the exact time which he had foretold upon astrological grounds, and the students whispered that he had taken the necessary steps to secure the fulfillment of his own prediction. Certainly such a practical bull carried to a tragic conclusion, confirming the truth of astrology by a chance which really showed it to be false, and that at the cost of his own life, was a most fitting end for a thoroughgoing humorist. There would be a charm about setting such a trap for future dabblers in eccentric logical quibbles. In the "Anatomy," Burton delivers his own views upon astrology with delightful ambiguity. If, he says, Sextus Empiricus, Picus Mirandula, Sextus ab Heminga, or others, have persuaded any man that the signs in the heavens have no more virtue than the signs over a shop or an inn, the skeptic may be referred to Bellantius, Pirovânus, Marascallerus, or Goclenius, who, let us hope, will give him satisfaction. Meanwhile, his own view is that the stars do not compel but incline, and incline so gently that a wise man may resist them. This charmingly elastic hypothesis is enough to allow your true humorist to reconcile his love of the marvelous with the occasional promptings of common sense. Burton, indeed, might have found authorities enough in his own day to make a genuine belief in astrology respectable. But downright belief was hardly in his way. The question for him was not the truth or falsehood of a doctrine, but the facility which it afforded for dallying with grotesque fancies. Living in the intellectual twilight, when the fastastic shapes of old superstition and mythical philosophy blended strangely with the growth of really scientific hypotheses, he could ramble at will through the stores of obsolete learning, picking up here and there whatever passage suited the fanciful faculty which had displaced his reason. To a genuine reasoner, or a man of independent common sense, there is a broad distinction between a proof and an illustration; between adducing evidence for a fact and merely quoting some anecdote or phrase which expresses the opinion of a predecessor. He has beliefs of his own, and applies an independent test to other men's statements. But with Burton the distinction disappears, and we can therefore never quite settle whether he is a pedant in earnest or in sport, or in a mood strangely composed of the two.

In the eighteenth century Burton fell into the hands of one who, whatever his faults, must be reckoned among the very greatest of literary artists. No man had a more acute sense than Sterne of the possibilities of transmuting unpromising