Every genuine author, in a greater or less degree, leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character; elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person.  While we read the pages of the “Fall of the House of Usher,” or of “Mesmeric Revelations,” we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncracies—­of what was most remarkable and peculiar—­in the author’s intellectual nature.  But we see here only the better phases of his nature, only the symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had deprived him of all faith, in man or woman.  He had made up his mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole system with him was an imposture.  This conviction gave a direction to his shrewd and naturally unamiable character.  Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind which enabled him to cope with villany, while it continually caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty.  He was in many respects like Francis Vivian, in Bulwer’s novel of “The Caxtons.”  Passion, in him, comprehended many of the worst emotions which militate against human happiness.  You could not contradict him, but you raised quick choler; you could not speak of wealth, but his cheek paled with gnawing envy.  The astonishing natural advantages of this poor boy—­his beauty, his readiness, the daring spirit that breathed around him like a fiery atmosphere—­had raised his constitutional self-confidence into an arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices against him.  Irascible, envious—­bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold repellant cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers.  There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor.  He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—­not shine, not serve—­succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.

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“LAUGH AND GET FAT!”

BY JOHN KENYON

Lack we motives to laugh?  Are not all things, anything, everything, to be laughed at?  And if nothing were to be seen, felt, heard, or understood, we would laugh at it too! Merry Beggars.

  I.
  There’s nothing here on earth deserves
    Half of the thought we waste about it,
  And thinking but destroys the nerves,
    When we could do so well without it: 
  If folks would let the world go round,
    And pay their tithes, and eat their dinners,
  Such doleful looks would not be found,
    To frighten us poor laughing sinners. 
  Never sigh when you can sing,
  But laugh, like me, at everything!