all their lives with adversity; and Goldsmith died in his prime, embittered in his last hours by distress and debt.  Banim, the great Irish novelist, withered early out of life upon a government pittance of a pension; Griffin gave up literature, became a monk, and found in youth a grave; Carleton, one of the most gifted humorists that ever painted the many-colored pictures of Irish character, is now struggling against the pressure of a small income in his advancing years.  Not to carry this melancholy list farther,—­which might be indefinitely prolonged,—­we close it with the name of Thomas Hood.

But not by contest with realities of life alone have humorists been saved from temptations to any dangerous levity; great humorists, as we have said, have generally been earnest men, very grave at heart, and much that they have written has been tragedy in the guise of irony.  All readers cannot find this out.  They cannot see the grief of life beneath its grin; they cannot detect the scorn or the pity that is hidden in joke or banter; neither can they always find out the joke or banter that is covered by a solemn face; and many a sincere believer has been deemed an atheist because he burlesqued hypocrites with their own gravity.  Numbers judge only by the outside, and never reach the spirit of writing or of man.  They laugh at the contortions of grimace, but of the mysteries of mind or the pains of heart which underlie the contortions they know nothing.  They snatch their rapid pleasure, and leave unvalued the worth of him who gives it; they care not for the cost of genius or labor at which it has been procured; and when they have had their transient indulgence, they have had all they sought and all that they could enjoy.

The relation of many to the humorist is illustrated by that of the doctor, on a certain occasion, to Liston, the celebrated comedian.  Liston was subject to constitutional melancholy, and in a severe attack of it he consulted a famous physician.

“Go and see Liston,” said the doctor.

“I am Liston,” said the actor.

And thus the inner soul of a great humorist is often as unrecognized by those who read him as was the natural personality of Liston by the doctor.

FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE.

Every man when he first crosses the ocean is a Columbus to himself, no matter how many voyages by other navigators he may have heard described or read recorded.  Geographies convince only the brain, not the senses, that the globe is round; and when personal experience exhibits the fact, it is as wonderful as if never before suggested.  You have dwelt for weeks within one unbroken loneliness of sea and sky, with nothing that seemed solid in the universe but the bit of painted wood on which you have floated.  Suddenly one morning something looms high and cloudlike far away, and you are told that it is land.  Then you feel, with all ignorant races, as if the ship were a god,