From the Saturday Review.

LIFE.

THE secret of Punch's popularity - we mean the Punch of our streets-lies, we believe, in the unquenchable vitality of the hero; his irrepressible, indomitable life. Foreigners complain of the moral. Merit, it must be owned, does not triumph, but, on the other hand, life is seen controlling adverse circumstances, and in all the nobility of never giving in. Life, as here personified, in full play, meeting all emergences, rallying after every blow, and rising to every occasion, is, in fact, wherever seen, the idol of mankind. What is any quality without freshness, and what is freshness but life? It matters little what else a man is

so far as making a hero of him goes if he has this; and nobody is truly hateful to his fellowmen who possesses it in an exceptional degree. For life in its very nature simulates a virtue. It seeks and welcomes life in others; it loves companionship, diffuses its own element, cheers and invigorates in spite of itself; it elates, strengthens, warms, by its mere presence. People who possess it are benefactors without meaning it - that is, without trouble or care. The person who is the life of a family or a circle need be no better than his neighbours, no more self-denying, no more generous; he has simply to expand, show himself, give play to the exuberance of his nature, and his coming is a festival, his going casts a shadow. His other gifts, taken separately, are not perhaps in excess of those about him. There are those of whom one might say

There were wit in this head an' 'twould out, and so there is, but it lies coldly in him as fire in a flint, which will not show without knocking.

But his spark is always first alight. Most persons have known occasions when society draws them out, makes them feel a conscious brightness; these people stimulate themselves and us too. We are not speaking mystically of the rich full life of which the transcendentalists talk so much, but of that impulse of conjoint thought and motion which makes a man present, a part of the scene wherever he is; which inspires a sense of enjoyment in mere living, which makes him ready for every new conjuncture, and prompts to vigorous action whenever it is called for.

circumstances open to them new objects, new fields of action, or the return to old ones, they are ready to take their part. The present, to them, is still their sphere. As they have never been dreamers or castle-builders for their pleasure, so now they neither brood over the past, nor feel it incumbent on them to seem to do so. In a woman, this consciousness of being still herself will often interfere with the fulfilment of certain conventional requirements of sentiment. If, for example, she loses her husband, she will not, whatever her sense of loss, permanently conform herself to the model set up by romance. She will not acquiesce in the semi-death that is expected of her, and that does, in fact, overshadow certain feminine natures through a life-long widowhood; typified in them by mourningweeds never laid aside. A sense of vigorous life cannot tolerate this shroud beyond a given term. She must assume some symbol of cheerfulness in garb and surroundings; some freshness, brightness, finish, or grace that shall assimilate her while she lives with living spirit in her and around her.

When not duly held in check, it must be owned that this fullness of life is apt to lead to an interference and meddling with other people's affairs, or with affairs not strictly within its province. This is its weak side. There belongs to it a tingling to be doing, a notion of a call to undertake other people's work, which now and then is a worry and It is no merit in one of these finely-en- vexation to less vivacious spirits. Never

theless every society is in the long run the better for the presence of one of those genial busybodies whose time is always in advance of other folks. They are the people who effect small improvements that nobody wanted at the time, and that nobody would undo when once they have got used to them. Vitality, in fact, involves a sort of leadership, but it is a different thing from the rule of a strong will. There is a fascination in life; in its presence we find ourselves, as it were, in a vortex. Nobody can really resist or stand against a vivacious nature in close contact with his own. Allied to good temper it is charmingly irresistible; but even without this, it carries its own claim on the face of it, and makes tyranny itself more tolerable. Sometimes, however, through mere failure of perception, it becomes an engine of terrible persecution. In their own energy natures of this sort are apt to understand very little of other people's weakness, so that one may say that this abounding life is incapacitated for certain offices of charity. They have, for example, tenderness and sympathy for a short fever or a knock-down sorrow; but as for chronic ailments, for diseases of mind and body that show themselves in lingering or capricious forms, they comprehend too little of it all to be trusted. Their instincts are all at fault. No amount even of good-nature can make up for the absence of fellow-feeling and sympathy.

ways or times or occupations. He is na-
turally and unconsciously young on all
these points, and is careless of the little in-
dulgences that mere students, or mere sports-
men, or mere men of business slip into the
way of allowing themselves. He is open to
every call and suggestion of the hour, hav-
ing no counter-force of custom, no weight of
precedent, to oppose and resist. Not that
this vivacity of nature has any real relation
to restlessness-on the contrary, it thorough-
ly understands how to be, and how to make
others, comfortable; only it is circumstance
rather than habit that decides it when and
how to take its ease. It was a tempera-
ment of this sort that the poet character-
ized as

So loitering, so active, so idle;
Which hath she most need of,a spur or a bridle?
Thus a greyhound outruns the whole pack in a

race,

Yet would rather be hanged than he'd leave a warm place.

It is of the essence of vigorous life to be equal to prompt change, to meet interruption cheerfully, to have the power of making rapid transitions from one subject or employment to another, not from desultoriness or want of grasp or inconstancy of purpose, but from the spring and facility of a more perfect vitality than ordinary.

Though this is a natural gift, it is also certain that some modes of life induce and strengthen, and that others sober and subdue it. It is hardly compatible, we believe, with the student life. Sedentary application is so counter to untrained human nature that it can only be acquired at the expense of a general subjugation of the whole frame, bodily and mental, to habit. Southey at an early age found it horrible to have to renounce his customary routine, and forsake his desk.

The quality we mean never shows itself in one department only. It is an organization, a spirit pervading the whole man, quickening thought, according to his capacity, but the same time preventing his being merely a thinker, and compelling to action, to society to benevolence, if that is his bent to prominence of some sort. The ideal child has this fulness of life - the "I am dragged," he writes while limbs always in motion, the mind always yet a young man," into a party of pleasure alert, the spirits and observation always for two days; an hour's hanging would be a fresh and on the qui vive. Life, in fact, is luxury to me compared with these detestathe same thing as youth, and keeps some- ble schemes." When disturbance becomes thing of the child in man so long as he terrible, when it is dreadful to a man, as it lives at all. No man of this organization is to the student, to be put out of his way, ever feels old. Out of deference to facts, or he has lost, or he has never possessed, all to maintain a character for good sense, he superabounding life. On the other hand, may put on the manners of his contem- sailors of all ranks and ages give us a readyporaries, but he has a spring within him that for-anything impression which at least simgives the lie to this decorous seeming, and ulates the thing we mean, and which conthat betrays itself to the observer in spite of stitutes their charm to landsmen. What him. A man thus happily gifted does not freshness, what childlike capability of fall into routine habits, which are a way of amusement was, for example, represented economizing our physical resources. He is to our minds the other day by the spectaessentially versatile, and can change his in- cle of four bronzed, middle-aged, blue-shirtterests and transfer his attention at the bid-ed fellows from the Minotaur taking a drive ding of events. He does not get wedded to of so many miles and back in an open fly!

No seaman could ever have invented the | sense of decorum by giving dinner-parties word bore that word expressive, in those on her death-bed. When we find Schiller who use it habitually and naturally, of a pronouncing her, of all living creatures low standard of vital force, and as such fill-ever met, the most vivacious, we understand ing us with pity and melancholy; though it better. Death is an idea so alien to perthe bored one is possibly supported by sons of this temperament that, though he that sense of superiority which goes nowa- reason assents to it as a fact, it cannot overdays with caring for few things. For with shadow their minds. The victims of bile, us affectation takes the line of weariness and indigestion, and all such lowering, depressof flagging power. We gather from old ing influences may live to old age in spite of writers that vivacity used to be the thing them, but they must still be afflicted by simulated. fears and imaginations suggestive of decay and extinction, all their faults and sins be

been once the mode.

ty vitality can reach.

He

She tripped and laugh'd, too pretty much to stand. The reigning toast would run into a drawing doubled and blackened in men's eyes by the mere misfortune of a sullen temperaing-room with an air of delighted expectament. Charles Lamb was peculiarly sustion. And the obsolete terms for male dandyism "bloods," "bucks," and so forth ceptible of the charm of vitality and the reall point to excess of vivacity as having pleads, in favor of the old comedies, for a pulsiveness of the morbid temper. As few persons have taste enough to world apart from morals, where vigour and manage a truly exuberant life gracefully, it life, in which the dramatis persona of these is apt to incur the charge of vulgarity with productions are so pre-eminent, shall stand more or less justice. There is a triumph-time being. And he draws a picture of instead of merit; in fact, be virtue for the ant vulgarity to be found in all ranks which no doubt owes its success to this quality; and shows to what excesses a dry and scansaturnine Hazlitt which makes bile a vice, indeed no one, whether duchess or washer66 'I took him," he woman, cockney or bagman, can be picturesquely, strikingly, dramatically vulgar with- "to see a very pretty girl, where out it. For a full sense of life saves from there were two young girls; the head and self-consciousness, timidity, and a host of in- sum of the girlery was two young girls; they neither laughed nor sneered nor giggled ward restraints, and will and must have a field. This exuberance being an excess of nor whispered, but they were young girls; health, it has nothing to do with the excit- and he sat and frowned blacker and blackability which burns the candle of life at bother, indignant that there should be such ends, and which especially belongs to pothings as youth and beauty, till he tore me ets. De Quincey speaks of the self-consum- away before supper in perfect misery, and ing fire that burnt up the life of Words-owned he could not bear young girls, they worth and his sister. They lived faster than other people; and he was taken for sixty before he was forty. The eager spirit had wrought within him

Those shocks and passions to prepare
That kill the bloom before its time,
And blanch without the owner's crime
The most resplendent hair.

This is so little the case with the healthy vitality of which we speak, and which is conspicuous in all great men whose genius lies in action and in commerce with mankind, that the most remarkable instance of this vigour that the world has lately seen kept its owner sprightly and juvenile till far past the ordinary age of man. But this vivacity of life does not necessarily imply longevity, just as a man may exist to a hundred without it. It only enables a person to live while he lives, and to enjoy life while he has it. "With the exception of three mortal diseases," writes Sidney Smith, "I am quite well." Life in him would not flag or give in. Madame de Staël shocks our

writes,

drove him mad." It is notable of Hazlitt, as the opposite of the airy temperament we have changed a single opinion. A fulness have dwelt upon, that he boasted never to of life, on the contrary, leads to variation, modification, and advance. Not to change with time and events means to stagnate, to brood, to feed upon oneself, and in fact disqualifies a man for active usefulness. An energetic vitality adapts man to the state of things in which he must live, and so of all things-even more than pure intellect itself-is the way to success. If we wonder, as we so often have to do, why the gifted man is left behind in the race, and the fellow he used to beat with ease is miles before him, we shall usually find that life has carried it over mere brains; and so it must, if we consider that it, of all things, has most hold over the present. Very few men, says Swift, live in the present; most people are providing to live another time. An energetic life is a constant sense of the now, and a faculty of making the most of it.

POETRY: Ladies' Luggage; or Hard Lines by a Brute, 706. Death of Summer, 706. Literary Coincidence, 706. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, 706.

SHORT ARTICLES: Courtliness in Common Life, 735. Aqueous Vapour in the Stars, 735.
Shakspeare in Time of Charles II., 735.

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