crater of Mount Etna, and whose brazen sandal, ejected in some subsequent explosion, proved a more durable record of his fate than any tablets could have supplied. Still fewer could imitate the physician who, in his zeal for the improvement of anatomy, bequeathed his body to Surgeons' Hall for dissection. This is indeed the perfection of self-oblivion-the triumph of philanthropy. Demonax, the ancient Cretan philosopher, was equally unsolicitous about his remains, of which he wished the birds and animals to be participators. "Is it a crime," he exclaimed, "that having endeavoured to benefit mankind in my life, my body should do the same to beasts after my death ?" What sepulchre so sublime as the mighty ocean, with its unimagined wonders and sumless treasures, its ever-rolling billows above, and its boundless floors below, tesselated with spars and shells, crystal and seaweed? There, whole cities are submerged, with their churches, through whose portals the porpus flounders, and their palaces, amid whose marble halls the dolphin may recognise his own sculptured image. In that heaped-up repository is all the wealth for which men live and die. Argosies, with their golden freightage spangling the level sand-statues upon which the patient Grecian exhausted his divine art, armour and diamonds, spices and rich robes, gums and perfumes; ancient galleys, and modern men-ofwar.-Beneath those waters lie stretched out in peaceful contact the skeletons of those who met upon their surface in fierce encounter; the bullets of every nation are scattered around their victims in indistinguishable profusion; while the tenants of the deep float heedlessly athwart these precious relics of an unknown world. Bards, with whose melodious strains we are still enchanted, have found a grave in the unfathomed deep; -Orpheus, whom the mad Bacchanals sent "down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore;" he who sang "The Shipwreck," and perished in some unknown wilderness of the waters; Lycidas, whom Milton would not allow to welter to the parching wind, "without the meed of some melodious tear;" and other less illustrious sons of song. Peace to your manes; ye who have passed away before us into the invisible world! Whether ye repose in the bosom of the great mother, or are whelmed beneath the caverns of "the bounding Neptune," we bid ye each farewell, in the words of the ancient Romans to their deceased friends—“ Vale! vale! vale! nos te ordine quo Natura permiserit, sequemur." THE WISDOM OF LAUGHTER. "Let those now laugh who never laugh'd before, THEY have really brought puppetshows to an incredible perfection. I have just been gazing upon one which infinitely transcends all the fantoccini, pantomimes, or dramas, I ever beheld; the figures appear ing to be actuated by human passions, and exhibiting in their looks, gestures, activity, and earnestness, such manifold tokens of mutual comprehension and intelligence, that were it not for the ridiculous actions they are made to perform, one might almost swear they were rational beings. Punch and Judy, even with the assistance of the Devil and the Monk, must be totally superseded by this more numerous and complete exhibition; and yet the puppets of which I am speaking were nothing more than a little modified earth, of so brittle and fragile a nature, that they were constantly frittering away into dust in the very midst of their dancing and struggling, when others instantly started up into their places, capering or fighting with as much eagerness as their predecessors,—so that the whole pageant was constantly renewing its actors without the smallest change or intermission in the incessant bustle of the performance. Here and there, upon elevated stools, I saw a few figures with glittering baubles upon their heads, who seemed not only miserable, but giddy and intoxicated by the height from which they looked, and took their revenge by instigating the whole rabble beneath them to worry and beat one another to pieces, which the senseless figures seemed to enact with a most preposterous alacrity. On the lower benches I beheld grave and reverend-looking seigniors in robes, whose heads were enveloped in the hair of some animal, most ludicrously curled and greased, and who were solemnly pronouncing sentence of destruction upon others, while they themselves were perpetually exploding into similar nothingness. Here strutted a gay figure in scarlet, who had not only sold himself as a slave for the honour of wearing a little gold ornament upon his shoulder, but suffered his head to be shot at as a target, and his body to be used as a sheath for bayonets, for the amiable privilege of inflicting the same treatment upon others. There I beheld a portly personage in sable robes, who took money from his companions for pointing out to them the way to the skies, while he himself kept constantly walking in a contrary direction ;-and in various quarters I contemplated certain old puppets, whom I took to be miners, as they laboured so hard at piling up heaps of shining ore that it seemed to shorten their existence; when younger ones ran joyfully up, and began kicking about the masses which had been so painfully accumulating. I cannot attempt a description of all the fantastical freaks which were exhibited; but I repeat that, with the exception of their actions, these ingenious puppets conducted themselves so exactly like rational creatures, that the absurdity of the whole scene, together with the contrast of their stupendous efforts and bubble-like existence, occasioned me to burst into an immoderate fit of laughter. It was probably some such meditation upon the weakness, vanity, and inconsistency, the gigantic pro jects and pigmy powers of man, that kept Democritus in continual laughter, and enabled him to convert both kings and peasants into materials of risibility. Being once at the Court of Darius, when that monarch lost his favourite wife, he promised to restore her to life, provided they would give him the names of three men who had never known adversity, that he might inscribe them upon her tombstone; and upon the prince acknowledging the impossibility of complying with his request, he asked him, with his usual laugh, why he should expect to escape affliction, when not one, among so many millions, was exempt from calamity? Here was philosophy as well as laughter; and indeed I doubt whether there be any wisdom more profound than that which developes itself by our risible faculties. This convulsion, as well as reason, is peculiar to man, and one may, therefore, fairly assume that they illustrate and sympathize with one another. Animals were meant to cry, for they have no other mode of expression; and infants, who are in the same predicament, are provided with a similar resource; but when we arrive at man's estate (the only one to which I ever succeeded), both the sound and physiognomy of weeping must be admitted altogether brutal and irrational. The former is positively unscriptible, and we should never utter any thing that cannot be committed to writing; and as to a lachrymose visage, I appeal to the reader whether it be not contemptible and fish-like, beyond all the fascinations of Niobe herself to redeem. All associations connected with this degrading process are hateful. Perhaps I may be deemed fastidiously sensitive upon this point, but I confess that I feel an antipathy towards a whale, because it has a tendency to blubber; I abominate the common crier, simply on account of his name; I would rather get wet through than seek shelter under a weep |