“But, dear me! I am keeping you in the draught of this court, and you go the other way. Good-morning, madam! Good-morning! I wish you a very GOODmorning! Don't speak, I beg. GOOD-morning!"

And so, thus heaping emphasis upon emphasis upon this very new valediction, and retaining a double smile amidst his good wishes, from his very new joke about the ghost of a tooth, our hero of Commonplace takes his leave.

AMIABLENESS SUPERIOR TO INTELLECT.

IN our article upon the gossiping old gentleman who appeared to sympathize so excessively with the lady's toothache, we omitted to caution some of our readers against supposing that we were contradicting our usual sympathetic theories, and laughing at any innocent exemplification of them, however trivial. But though the gentleman was harmless, except in his tediousness, and not an ill-natured man, and did far better than if he had set himself to waste an equal portion of time in the manifestation of antipathy, yet sympathy was not the ground of his proceeding: it was pure want of ideas, and a sensation, the necessity of killing time. We should not object even to any innocent mode of doing that, where a human being lives under a necessity so unfortunate, and has not the luck to be a hedger or ditcher; but it is desirable not to let sympathy be mistaken for something different from what it is, especially where it takes a shape that is ridiculous.

On the other hand, with regard to the commonplace of the matter, apart from an absolute extravagance of insipidity, far are we from wishing to treat commonplaces with derision, purely as such. They are the common clay of which human intercourse is made,

and therefore as respectable in our eyes as any other of the ordinary materials of our planet, however desirous we may be of warming them into flowers. Nay, flowers they have, provided the clay be pure and kindly. The air of health and cheerfulness is over them. They are like the common grass, and the daisies and buttercups. Children have them; and what children have, the most uncommon grown people may envy, unless they have health and cheerfulness

too.

It is Sir Walter Scott, we believe, who has observed somewhere, that men of superior endowments, or other advantages, are accustomed to pay too little regard to the intercourse of their less-gifted fellowcreatures, and to regret all the time that is passed in their company. He says they accustom themselves so much to the living upon sweets and spices, that they lose a proper relish for ordinary food, and grow contemptuous of those who subsist upon it, to the injury of their own enjoyment. They keep their palate in a constant state of thirst and irritation, rather than of healthy satisfaction. And we recollect Mr. Hazlitt making a remark to a similar effect; namely, that the being accustomed to the society of men of genius renders the conversation of others tiresome, as consisting of a parcel of things that have been heard a thousand times, and from which no stimulus is to be obtained. He lamented this as an effect unbecoming a reflecting man and a fellow-creature (for though irritable, and sometimes resentful, his heart was large, and full of humanity); and the consequence was, that nobody paid greater attention than he to common conversation,

or showed greater respect towards any endeavors to interest him, however trite. Youths of his acquaintance are fond of calling to mind the footing of equality on which he treated them, even when children; gravely interchanging remarks with them, as he sat side by side, like one grown person with another, and giving them now and then (though without the pomp) a Johnsonian, "Sir." The serious earnestness of his "Indeed, m'um !" with lifted eyebrows, and protruded lips, while listening to the surprising things told him by good housewives about their shopping or their preserves, is now sounding in our ears; and makes us long to see again the splenetic but kindly philosopher, who worried himself to death about the good of the nations.

There is but one thing necessary to put any reflecting person at his ease with commonplace people; and that is, their own cheerfulness and good-humor. To be able to be displeased, in spite of this, is to be insensible to the best results of wisdom itself. When all the Miss Smiths meet all the Miss Joneses, and there is nothing but a world of smiles and recognitions and gay breath, and loud askings after this person and that, and comparisons of bonnets and cloaks, and "So glads! and "So sorrys!" and rosy cheeks, or more lovely good-natured lips, who that has any good humor of his own, or power to extract a pleasant thought from pleasant things, desires wit or genius in this fullblown exhibition of comfortable humanity? He might as well be sullen at not finding wit or genius in a cart full of flowers, going along the street, or in the spring cry of "Primroses.”

A total want of ideas in a companion, or of the power to receive them, is indeed to be avoided by men who require intellectual excitement; but it is a great mistake to suppose that the most discerning men demand intellect above every thing else in their most habitual associates, much less in general intercourse. Happy would they be to see intellect more universally extended, but as a means, not as an end, as a help to the knowledge of what is amiable, and not what is merely knowing. Clever men are sometimes said even to be jealous of clever companions, especially female ones. Men of genius, it is notorious, for a very different reason, and out of their own imagination of what is excellent, and their power to adorn what they love, will be enamoured, in their youth, of women neither intelligent nor amiable nor handsome. They make them all three with their fancy; and are sometimes too apt, in after-life, to resent what is nobody's fault but their own. However, their faults have their excuses, as well as those of other men: only they who know most should excuse most. But the reader may take our word for it, from the experience of long intercourse with such men, that what they value above every other consideration in a companion, female or male, is amiableness; that is to say, evenness of temper, and the willingness (general as well as particular) to please and be pleased, without egotism and without exaction. This is what we have ever felt to be the highest thing in themselves, and gave us a preference for them, infinite, above others of their own class of power. We know of nothing capable of standing by the side of it, or of supplying its place, but one; and