Various

“ If there are some people who cannot laugh, there are others who will not. It is not, however, that they are ashamed of being grown men, and want to go back to babyhood, for by some extraordinary perversity, they fancy unalterable gravity to be the distinguishing characteristic of wisdom. In a merry company, they present the appearance of a Red Indian whitewashed, and look on at the strange ways of their neighbours without betraying even the faintest spark of sympathy or intelligence. ”

“ Who's for a cheap ride on what a pleasant writer calls the 'silent highway?'—silent no longer, since the steamers have taken to plying above Bridge at a charge which has made the surface of the Thames, where it runs through the heart of London, populous with life, and noisy with the clash of paddles and the rush of steam, to say nothing of the incessant chorus of captains, engine-boys, and gangway-men—with their 'Ease her,' 'Stop her,' 'Back her,' 'Turn ahead,' 'Turn astarn,' 'Now, marm, with the bundle, be alive,' 'Heave ahead there, will you?' &c., all the day long. ”

“ They may laugh in their heart, and with their eyes, although by some unlucky fatality, they have not the gift of oral cachinnation. Such persons are to be pitied; for laughter in grown people is a substitute devised by nature for the screams and shouts of boyhood, by which the lungs are strengthened and the health preserved. As the intellect ripens, that shouting ceases, and we learn to laugh as we learn to reason. ”

“ Sometimes it comes to us in the midst of care, or sorrow, or irksome business; and then we turn away, and listen, and hear it ringing through the room like a silver bell, with power to scare away the ill spirits of the mind. ”

“ It turns the prose of our life into poetry; it flings showers of sunshine over the darksome wood in which we are travelling; it touches with light even our sleep, which is no more the image of death, but gemmed with dreams that are the shadows of immortality. ”

“ It will weep, when it has got the length of tears, by the pailful; it will clench its fists, distort its face into a hideous expression of anguish, and scream itself into convulsions. It has not yet come up to a laugh. ”

“ Mr Arbuthnot strove to bear his wife from the apartment, but she would not be forced away, and kept imploring with frenzied vehemence that Robert—that her boy should not be taken from her.
'I have no wish to do so—far from it,' said Danby with gleeful exultation. 'Only folk must be reasonable, and not threaten their friends with the hulks'——
'Give him anything, anything!' broke in the unhappy lady. ”

“ The slow growth of the newspaper press from these times is very remarkable. Even so late as sixty years since, a London paper was a very meagre and timid affair. Before us lies a copy of the Times of 1797, insignificant in size and appearance. The small modicum of news is entirely foreign: no brilliant leaders, models of composition—no fearless correction of abuse, or withering sarcasm of folly. ”

“ We have a suspicion that there is something wrong here—that the world is mistaken not only in its reasonings, but its facts. To assign laughter to an early period of life, is to go contrary to observation and experience. There is not so grave an animal in this world as the human baby. ”

“ It is then at the mercy of the autumn blast, and it is said that thousands may sometimes be seen coursing over the plain, rolling, dancing, and leaping over the slight inequalities, often looking at a distance like a troop of wild horses. It is not uncommon for twenty or thirty to become entangled into a mass, and then roll away, as Mr Kohl says, "like a huge giant in his seven-league boots." ”

“ Then come more wharfs and warehouses, as we glide past, while our pace slackens, and we stop gently within a stone's-throw of London Bridge, at Dyers' Hall, where we are bundled out of the boat with as little ceremony as we were bundled in, and with as little, indeed, as it has ever been the custom to use since ceremony was invented—which, in matters of business, is a very useless thing. ”

“ She was introduced to me, with old-fashioned simplicity, as 'My grand-daughter, Agnes Townley.' It is difficult to look at beauty through other men's eyes, and, in the present instance, I feel that I should fail miserably in the endeavour to stamp upon this blank, dead paper, any adequate idea of the fresh loveliness, the rose-bud beauty of that young girl. ”

“ Yonder young fellow, with the dripping sack on his back, is staggering under a load of oysters from Billingsgate, and he has got to wash them and sell them for three a penny, and see them swallowed one at a time, before his work will be done for the day—and behind him is a comely lassie, with a monster oil-glazed sarcophagus-looking milliner's basket, carrying home a couple of bonnets to a customer. ”

“ Thus she became imbued with an abiding interest in the genius of old Rome—'the power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose'—where man takes a 'noble bronze in camps and battle-fields,' his brow well furrowed by the 'wrinkles of council,' and his eye 'cutting its way like the sword;' and thence she loved to escape, at Ovid's behest, to the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill—delighted to realise in those Greek forms the faith of a refined and intense childhood. ”

“ There goes a foreigner—foreigners like to have things cheap—with a bushy black beard and a pale face, moustached and whiskered to the eyes, and puffing a volume of smoke from his invisible mouth; and there is a washer-woman, with a basket of clothes weighing a hundredweight. ”

“ But our song, like Dibdin's, 'means more than it says;' for a man, as we have stated, may laugh, and yet the cachinnation be wanting. His heart laughs, and his eyes are filled with that kindly, sympathetic smile which inspires friendship and confidence. On the sympathy within, these external phenomena depend; and this sympathy it is which keeps societies of men together, and is the true freemasonry of the good and wise. It is an imperfect sympathy that grants only sympathetic tears: we must join in the mirth as well as melancholy of our neighbours. ”

“ Come, we must dive down this narrow lane, past the 'Fox under the Hill,' a rather long and not very sightly, cleanly, smooth, or fragrant thoroughfare; and here, in this shed-looking office, you must pay your half-penny, which guarantees you a passage all the way to London Bridge. Look alive! as the money-taker recommends—the Bee, you see, is already discharging her living cargo, and others are hurrying on board. The boat won't lose time in turning round—she goes backwards and forwards as straight as a saw, and carries a rudder at her nose as well as one at her tail. ”

“ It is undeniable, that small towns stand in pressing need of local channels for advertisements, and here, we think, is their strongest ground. How much more important, in a town of 5000 inhabitants, that the principal mercer should have his fresh arrival of goods advertised in a paper which circulates 500 copies in that town, than in some county-town journal which sends to it only some thirty or forty copies! ”

“ Give a man ready access to a journal in which this taste can be gratified, and his intellectual progress is certain. The utterly uneducated, seeing the pleasure which his fellows derive from the paper, will desire to learn to read, that he may enjoy the like pleasure. The man just able to read will be drawn on to reflect and judge, and in time he will desire intellectual food from books also. The cheap newspaper thus becomes a most powerful instrument for nursing the popular mind ”

“ The line of greatest cold, for example, which leaves the eastern coast of Labrador at about the 54th degree of latitude, rises six degrees as it approaches Greenland, and strikes the coast of Lapland a little above the 70th degree, or sixteen degrees nearer the pole than at its starting-point—thus shewing that the northern parts of Europe have a more genial climate than those of America. The line then curves fifteen degrees to the south across Siberia, rises again on the western coast of America, and falls once more as it advances towards the east. ”

“ The predominance is most marked in summer; in the winter, the easterly winds are almost as frequent as the westerly upon the continent, which is not true of the British isles.' Sometimes, however, the south-westerly winds, which bring our genial April showers, continue to arrive with their watery burden until late in the summer, to the detriment or destruction of grain-crops; and yet this same wind, losing its excessive moisture as it sweeps onward over the continent, is highly favourable to the husbandman in Southern Russia. ”

“ Then, look at the baby when it has turned into a little boy or girl, and come up in some degree to the cachinnation. The laughter is still only rudimental: it is not genuine laughter. It expresses triumph, scorn, passion—anything but a feeling of natural amusement. It is provoked by misfortune, by bodily infirmities, by the writhings of agonised animals ”

“ The common mistake is to associate the idea of amusement with error of every kind; and this piece of moral asceticism is given forth as true wisdom, and, from sheer want of examination, is very generally received as such. A place of amusement concentrates a crowd, and whatever excesses may be committed, being confined to a small space, stand more prominently forward than at other times. ”

“ The little savage must be educated by circumstances, and tamed by the contact of civilisation, before it rises to the greater functions of its being. Nay, we have sometimes received the idea from its choked and tuneless screams, that they were imperfect attempts at laughter. ”

“ Many readers who may be more or less familiar with certain species or even families of plants, will hardly have prepared themselves for a view of the phytology of a quarter of the globe, such as is given in outline in the interesting work now before us. The subject is one that has been largely investigated within the past twenty years, as may be seen in the records of the British Association, in the transactions of learned societies, and in the writings of numerous observers on the continent. ”

“ To all appearance, the abolition of the taxes on the spread of knowledge through the press is only a matter of time. The principal of these taxes is the Excise-duty on paper, which, as we have repeatedly urged, acts most detrimentally on the issue of a cheap class of publications. ”

“ Compared with the climate and tree-limits, the cultivation of corn does not go so high in the Alps as it does toward the north; for it ceases about with the beech in the Alps, and grazing is the regular pursuit in the region of firs; while in Scandinavia, the beech only goes to 59 degrees, and corn-culture to 70 degrees—that is, as far as the conifers. Corn succeeds in the latter under a mean temperature below the freezing-point, while in the Alps it ceases at 41 degrees Fahrenheit. ”

“ It would thus appear that the common charge brought against laughter, of being something babyish, or childish, or boyish—something properly appertaining to early life—is unfounded. But we of course must not be understood to speak of what is technically called giggling, which proceeds more from a looseness of the structures than from any sensation of amusement. Many young persons are continually on the giggle till their muscles strengthen ”

“ If our countrymen laughed more, they would not only be happier, but better; and if philanthropists would provide amusements for the people, they would be saved the trouble and expense of their fruitless war against public-houses. ”

“ The books which exercised most power over her at this period were Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Molière—all three students of the 'natural history of man,' and inspired by fact, not fancy; reconstructing the world from materials which they collected on every side, not spinning from the desires of their own special natures; and accordingly teaching her, their open-eyed disciple, to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience, but, as she confesses, also doing her harm, since the child, fed with meat instead of milk, becomes too soon mature. ”

“ As newspapers go pretty much on the principle of giving and taking in the way of intelligence, any tendency to prosecute on the ground of piracy would, in all probability, soon cure itself; and, therefore, we would not greatly rely on this as a reason for maintaining an exclusiveness in the business of newspaper publication. A more serious argument against the creation of a host of cheap local papers, is the probable dissemination of much petty scandal, and matter of a partially libellous or offensive character ”

“ She was then a wife and a mother, having been married privately to the Marquis Ossoli, a Roman, 'of a noble but impoverished house,' whom she described, in a letter to her mother, as 'not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with her,' being a man 'absolutely ignorant of books, and with no enthusiasm of character,' but endowed with excellent practical sense, a nice sense of duty, native refinement, and much sweetness of temper. ”

“ The average annual quantity of rain in the British islands is from 28 to 30 inches; on the continent, it is less; the fall in Holland is estimated at 26 inches, and in Denmark and North Germany, at 20 inches—the greatest fall occurring in summer and autumn, as in England. Then with respect to winds, we find those from the west most prevalent over what Mr Henfrey distinguishes as the north European plain, as is the case in our country. 'The west wind blows more frequently in England than in Denmark, more there than in Russia. ”

“ A sale of growing crops must, in like manner, be much more effectually advertised in a paper which circulates largely in a small district, than in one which is diffused sparsely over a large one. All this, indeed, is amply proved by the tendency which has been shewn of late years, in Scotland at least, to set up unstamped monthly local papers containing advertisements, and by the comparative success which these journals have met with. ”

“ Then came an upheaval; a vast tract of land rose above the water, without any break, as at present between England and the continent; and at this period 'there appears to have been a migration of both plants and animals from east to west, the descendants of which still constitute the great body of the flora and fauna of the British lowlands.' Meantime, the elevation of the former islands into mountain summits, placed them in a temperature suited to the perpetuation of their vegetation. ”