Heroes and martyrs are perhaps too high examples, for they may have, or rather poor, common, every-day humanity will think they have, a kind of high-pressure sustainment.  Let us look to our own prosaic days; let us mark the constant cheerfulness and manliness of Dr. Maginn, or that much higher heroic bearing of Tom Hood.  We suppose that every body knows that Hood’s life was not of that brilliant, sparkling, fizzing, banging, astonishing kind which writers such as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and some others, depict as the general life of literary men.  He did not, like Byron, “jump up one morning, and find himself famous.”  All the libraries were not asking for his novel, though a better was not written; countesses and dairy-women did not beg his autograph.  His was a life of constant hard work, constant trial or disappointment, and constant illness, enlivened only by a home affection and a cheerfulness as constant as his pain.  When slowly, slowly dying, he made cheerful fun as often almost as he said his prayers.  He was heard, after, perhaps, being almost dead, to laugh gently to himself in the still night, when his wife or children, who were the watchers, thought him asleep.  Many of the hard lessons of fate he seasoned, as old Latimer did his sermons, with a pun, and he excused himself from sending more “copy” for his magazine by a sketch, the “Editor’s Apologies,” a rough pen-and-ink drawing of physic-bottles and leeches.  Yet Hood had not only his own woes to bear, but felt for others.  No one had a more tender heart—­few men a more catholic and Christian sympathy for the poor—­than the writer of the “Song of the Shirt.”

What such men as these have done, every one else surely can do.  Cheerfulness is a Christian duty; moroseness, dulness, gloominess, as false, and wrong, and cruel as they are unchristian.  We are too far advanced now in the light of truth to go back into the Gothic and conventual gloom of the Middle Ages, any more than we could go back to the exercises of the Flagellants and the nonsense of the pre-Adamites.  All whole-hearted peoples have been lively and bustling, noisy almost, in their progress, pushing, energetic, broad in shoulder, strong in lung, loud in voice, of free brave color, bold look, and bright eyes.  They are the cheerful people in the world—­

    “Active doers, noble livers—­strong to labors sure to conquer;”

and soon pass in the way of progress the more quiet and gloomy of their fellows.  That some of this cheerfulness may be simply animal is true, and that a man may be a dullard and yet sit and “grin like a Cheshire cat;” but we are not speaking of grinning.  Laughter is all very well; is a healthy, joyous, natural impulse; the true mark of superiority between man and beast, for no inferior animal laughs; but we are not writing of laughter, but of that continued even tone of spirits, which lies in the middle zone between frantic merriment and excessive despondency.  Cheerfulness arises from various causes:  from health; but it is not dependent upon health;—­from good fortune; but it does not arise solely from that;—­from honor, and position, and a tickled pride and vanity; but, as we have seen, it is quite independent of these.  The truth is, it is a brave habit of the mind; a prime proof of wisdom; capable of being acquired, and of the very greatest value.