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"In truth, through all that period which we call the Dark and Middle Ages men's minds were possessed by the belief that all things continued as they were from the beginning, that no chasm never to be recrossed lay between them and that ancient world to which they had not ceased to look back. We who are centuries removed, can see that there had passed a great and wonderful change upon thought, and art, and literature, and politics, and society itself: a change whose best illustration is to be found in the process whereby there arose out of the primitive basilica the Romanesque cathedral, and from it in turn the endless varieties of the Gothic. But so gradual was the change, that each generation felt it passing over them no more than a man feels that perpetual transformation by which his body is renewed from year to year; while the few who had learning enough to study antiquity through its contemporary records, were prevented by the utter want of criticism and of that which we call historical feeling, from seeing how prodigious was the contrast between themselves and those whom they admired. There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavours to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard. . . . And thus, when we remember that the notion of progress and development, and of change as the necessary condition thereof, was unwelcome or unknown in medieval times, we may better understand, though we do not cease to wonder, how men, never doubting that the political system of antiquity had descended to them, modified indeed, yet in substance the same, should have believed that the Frank, the Saxon, and the Suabian, ruled all Europe by a right which seems to us not less fantastic than that fabled charter whereby Alexander the Great bequeathed his Empire, to the Slavic race for the love of Roxolana."

We have not room to follow Mr. Bryce through all the stages of the later German history, when the Empire had lost all Roman and imperial character, when the Emperor was again a mere German King, or rather a mere president of a German Confederation. The steps by which Germany sank from a kingdom into a confederation have an interest of their own, but it is one which more closely touches federal than imperial history. Germany is, as far as we know, the only example of a Confederation which arose, not out of the union of elements before distinct, but out of the dissolution of a formerly existing kingdom. From the Peace of Westphalia-we might almost say from the Interregnum onwards the imperial historian has little more to do than to watch the strange and blind affection with which men clave to the mere name of what had once been great and glorious. And yet we have seen that even that name was not without its practical effect. If, in Mr. Bryce's emphatic words, "the German Kingdom broke down beneath the weight

of the Roman Empire," it was certainly the name of the Roman Empire which hindered the severed pieces from altogether flying asunder. And the recollection of the Empire works still in modern politics, though we fear more for evil than for good. Patriotic Germans indeed look back with a sigh to the days when Germany was great and united under her Ottos and her Henrys, but these are remembrances of the Kingdom rather than of the Empire. The memory of the Empire is mainly used in modern times to prop up the position of the two upstart powers which now venture to profane the Imperial title. Because Gaul was once a German province, the Lord of Paris would have us believe that the successor of Charles is to be found among a people who in the days of the great Emperor had no national being. Because certain Austrian Dukes were chosen Roman Emperors, we are called upon, sometimes to condemn the great Frederick as a forerunner of Francis Joseph, sometimes to justify Francis Joseph as a successor of the great Frederick. We will wind up with the fervid and eloquent comments of Mr. Bryce on this latter head. A more vigorous denunciation of the great Austrian imposture we have seldom come across

"Austria has indeed, in some things, but too faithfully reproduced the policy of the Saxon and Suabian Cæsars. Like her, they oppressed and insulted the Italian people: but it was in the defence of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. Like her, they lusted after a dominion over the races on their borders, but that dominion was to them a means of spreading civilisation and religion in savage countries, not of pampering upon their revenues a hated court and aristocracy. Like her, they strove to maintain a strong government at home, but they did it when a strong government was the first of political blessings. Like her, they gathered and maintained vast armies; but those armies were composed of knights and barons who lived for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuating their own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another nationality. They sinned grievously, no doubt, but they sinned in the dim twilight of a half-barbarous age, not in the noonday blaze of modern civilisation. The enthusiasm for mediæval faith and simplicity which was so fervid some years ago, has run its course, and is not likely soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the best of them, were in some respects little better than savages. But when he approaches more recent times, and sees how, during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with their subjects, and with each other, he will forget the ferocity of the Middle Ages, in horror at the heartlessness, the treachery, the injustice all the more odious because it sometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the annals of the military monarchies of Europe. With regard, however, to the

pretensions of modern Austria, the truth is that this dispute about the worth of the old system has no bearing upon them at all. The day of imperial greatness was already past when Rudolf of the first Hapsburg reached the throne; while during what may be called the Austrian period, from Maximilian to Francis II., the Holy Empire was to Germany a mere clog and incumbrance, which the unhappy nation bore, because she knew not how to rid herself of it. The Germans are welcome to appeal to the old Empire to prove that they were once a united people. Nor is there any harm in their comparing the politics of the twelfth century with those of the nineteenth, although to argue from the one to the other seems to betray a want of historical judgment. But the one thing which is wholly absurd is to make Francis Joseph of Austria the successor of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, and justify the most sordid and ungenial of modern despotisms by the example of the mirror of medieval chivalry, the noblest creation of mediæval thought."

ART. VIII-1. Etchings and Sketchings. By A. PEN, Esq. 2. Sketches Contributed to Bell's Life.

3. The Fiddle-Faddle Fashion Book.

4. Parody in Lithograph of Mulready's Post-Office Envelope. 5. The Children of the Mobility.

6. The Comic Latin Grammar. By PERCEVAL LEIGH. Illustrated by LEECH.

7. The Comic English Grammar. By the Same.

8. Bentley's Miscellany. For many years. Profuse Illustrations.

9. The Marchioness de Brinvilliers. By ALBERT SMITH and LEECH.

10. The Adventures of Jack Ledbury. By Do. and do.

11. Blaine's Encyclopædia of Rural Sports.

12. Ballads. By BON GUALTIER.

13. Puck on Pegasus.

14. The Militiaman Abroad.

15. Christopher Tadpole.

16. Paul's Dashes of American Humour.

17. Seeley's Porcelain Tower.

18. Christmas Numbers of the London Illustrated News.

19. The Quizziology of the British Drama. By G. A. A'BECKETT.

20. The Story of a Feather. By DOUGLAS JERROLD.

21. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures.

22. Life of a Foxhound. By JOHN MILLS.

23. Crock of Gold, etc.

24. Colin Clink.

25. The Book of British Song.

26. Stanley Thorn.

27. Jack Hinton.

28. Punch's Pocket-Book. Up to 1864. Etchings and small

woodcuts.

29. Douglas Jerrold's Collected Works.

30. The Earlier Volumes of Once a Week.

31. Jack Brag. By THEODORE HOOK.

32. Journey to Pau. By Hon. ERSKINE MURRAY.

33. The Month. By ALBERT SMITH.

34. The Rising Generation: A Series of Twelve Large Coloured

Plates.

35. The Comic Cocker.

36. Young Troublesome.

37. The Comic History of England. Etchings and woodcuts.

38. The Comic History of Rome.

39. Handley Cross.

40. Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour.

Do. and do.

41. Ask Mamma.

42. Plain or Ringlets.

43. Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds.

44. A Little Tour in Ireland. By an Oxonian.

45. Master Jacky in Love: A Sequel to Young Troublesome.

46. The Christmas Carol. By CHARLES DICKENS.

47. The Cricket on the Hearth.

48. The Chimes.

49. Punch from 1841.

Do.

Do.

IF man is made to mourn, he also, poor fellow! and without doubt therefore, is made to laugh. He needs it all, and he gets it. For human nature may say of herself in the words of the ballad, "Werena my heart licht, I wad die."

Man is the only animal that laughs; it is as peculiar to him as his chin and his hippocampus minor. The perception of a joke, the smile, the sense of the ludicrous, the quiet laugh, the roar of laughter, are all our own; and we may be laughed as well as tickled to death, as in the story of the French nun of mature years, who, during a vehement fit of laughter, was observed by her sisters to sit suddenly still and look very "gash" (like the Laird of Garscadden), this being considered a farther part of the joke, when they found she was elsewhere.

In books, old and new, there is no end of philosophizing upon the ludicrous and its cause; from Aristotle, who says it is some error in truth or propriety, but at the same time neither painful nor pernicious; and Cicero, who defines it as that which, without impropriety, notes and exposes an impropriety; to Jean Paul, who says it is the opposite of the sublime, the infinitely great, and is therefore the infinitely little; and Kant, who gives it as the sudden conversion into nothing of a long raised and highlywrought expectation; many have been the attempts to unsphere the spirit of a joke and make it tell its secret; but we agree with our excellent and judicious friend Quinctilian, that its ratio is at best anceps. There is a certain robust felicity about old Hobbes's saying, that "it is a sudden glory, or sense of eminency above others or our former selves." There is no doubt at least about the suddenness and the glory; all true laughter must be involuntary, must come and go as it lists, must take us and shake us heartily and by surprise. No man can laugh any more than he can sneeze at will, and he has nearly as little to do with its ending--it dies out, disdaining to be killed. He may grin

1 No other animal has a chin proper, and it is a comfort, in its own small way, that Mr. Huxley has not yet found the lesser sea-horse in our grandfather's brain.

2 Vide Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences.

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