the most part an affectation, the result of a literary and social fashion, though to some extent the natural growth and development of a civilisation that is over-ripe. In all countries there recur times of great material prosperity-when men strive over-ardently for wealth, and when political corruption and the depravation of manners follow as inevitable consequences. In these times the cynic has not only ample scope, but ample material. But a great civil war a great struggle of one nation with another, or a revolution like that which swept over England in the seventeenth and over France in the eighteenth century-makes an end of the cynics, by giving the manhood of the people earnest and dangerous work to do; work, in the accomplishment of which there is no time for trifling; work that involves something higher and better than money-making-it may be no less than the liberty and the very existence of a nation. The cynics had no audience for their illnature in the days either of Cromwell or of Robespierre, though they found listeners enough under Charles II. and Louis XIV. The present time is one in which men work exceedingly hard for money, when they set an inordinate value upon it, and when to be poor, or to seem to be poor, is to be worse considered than to be dishonest and not poor. It is so in France and England-it is the same, though perhaps in a minor degree, in America. In consequence of the very hard work that men go through, day after day, in the struggle to be or seem to be rich, there is a tendency to undervalue everything but gold and that which gold will buy, and to look upon the successful man as the best of men, however great may be the crimes which he has committed in his life-and-death struggle for the wealth which all covet

"To steal for pence is dastardly and mean; To rob for millions with a soul serene Soils not the fingers. All success is clean."

There is also less taste for instruction, and more taste for amusement and for anything that will excite a laugh, than exists in times of greater contentedness and simplicity. Hence, as ill-natured wit is always laughed at, the wits cultivate ill-nature; and cynicism, sometimes real, but most commonly affected, flourishes in society, where it is as much esteemed by the diseased appetite of jaded and blasé people as game that is over-gamy or caviare, that pleases the miseducated palate which has lost its relish for wholesome food.

But modern cynicism does not assume the gross and vulgar shape which it wore in that olden time when dirty Diogenes told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunshine. The cynics of our day are very fine gentlemen in their own conceit; or very fine ladies who have outlived their passions. They dress in purple and fine linen, and fare luxuriously every day. They think the elegant club, or the more elegant drawing-room, infinitely preferable to the tub of Diogenes, or the sty in which that human hog grunted out his contempt for his superior fellow-creatures. The modern cynic has nothing of the dog about him but the snarl, and lacks the fidelity and affection of the worthy animal which has given its name to his philosophy. His cynicism is the systematic depreciation of human nature; the systematic love of himself, and the pampering of his own appetites; the systematic disregard of all that does not minister to his personal ease and enjoyment; the systematic denial of all great virtue, heroism, genius, or nobleness of character (except in dead men and women); and the systematic attribution of mean and selfish motives to the good deeds that are daily committed in the world. He may have the education, the position, and the polished manners of a gentleman, but he lacks the great essentials of goodness of heart and

Christian charity, without which none can be truly a gentleman, though he may trace back his pedigree for a thousand years, and be called "Your Lordship," "Your Grace," or "Your Majesty."

The censors and the satirists of human frailty are not to be confounded with the cynics. Heraclitus who wept, and Democritus who laughed, at the vices and follies of men, were philosophers who had different ways of looking at the same thing. Their standpoints were not identical, though the tears of the one and the smiles of the other were alike evidence of their sympathy with humanity. If there were love in the sorrow of the one, there was certainly no hatred in the merriment of the other. "Let no man," said Heine, "ridicule mankind unless he loves them"-a beautiful maxim, upon which, consciously or unconsciously, all the great poets and masters of fiction, and all the great artists who have excelled as caricaturists, have invariably acted. There is no cynicism in Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Scott, or Bulwer Lytton, or Dickens. Men of this high mental calibre see the bright as well as the dark side of human nature, and have too much reverence for God's creatures to look upon them as utterly bad, and to see no soul of goodness in them. In the thickest darkness of humanity they discover some gleam, however faint, of divine radiance, some kindly quality that shines through the gloom; the touch of nature that links to their kind even the basest of men and women. In like manner such artists as Hogarth, Gilray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Seymour, Tenniel, Doyle, and John Leech, who portray the vices, the foibles, and the follies of the people of their day, have not a particle of cynicism in their genius, but teach their lessons of wisdom in the kindliest spirit. They provoke us to laugh at snobs, humbugs, false pretenders, and fools-whether in high life or

in low-but they never attempt to instil misanthropy. They handle humanity as gently as Isaak Walton did the worm, and love even while they impale it. In fact, cynicism is a low and a mean thing, incompatible with high purpose either in art or literature. Poetry and satire may dwell together, but poetry and cynicism never. The cynic may write verses, but he can no more ascend into the higher region of poetry, than the earthworm or the maggot can soar into the empyrean.

The elegant cynicism of literature and society, such as we see it in this second half of the nineteenth century, is the product of a high state of civilisation, and scarcely made its appearance in Europe until the reign of Louis XIV., when it began to sparkle with a mild light in the Maxims and Moral Reflections of Francis Duke de la Rochefoucauld,' a little book that set all the world thinking, and excited more praise and more censure than were ever before showered upon any literary production.

"This work," according to Voltaire, who drew much of his best inspiration from its pages, "contributed greatly to form the taste of the nation. Although there is scarcely more than one truth in the book, which is, that self-love is the motive of all human action, this thought is presented under such a variety of aspects that it is nearly always piquant. It is less a book than a collection of materials for ornamenting a book. People read it greedily, and learned from it to think with precision, and to pack up the thoughts in a lively and delicate manner, and in small compass. This was a merit which, since the revival of literature, no one in Europe had previously exhibited." It is possible that ill-health may have had some influence over the mind of this very gentlemanly philosopher, for he suffered greatly from the gout; and that the physical

It cuts very deep nevertheless, and bleeds poor humanity of nearly all its virtues, leaving behind but a very dry and juiceless anatomy. Those who wholly or partially reject the philosophy are compelled to accept the wit; and those who wish to write well, look to it as a model of style, and find no better than the curt and courteous sentences in which the elegant misanthropy is so persuasively inculcated. Many of the maxims have become proverbial, and are endowed with as much immortality as the French language can achieve or any other, including our own, into which they have been translated. They are the very cream of cynical wisdom, and are too deeply imbued with unwelcome truth to be justly liable to the charge of being baseless libels upon humanity. cite a few that will bear repetition, even though La Rochefoucauld were more familiar than he is to the reading public of the nineteenth century.

We

"Our passions are the only orators who are certain to persuade us. We have all of us sufficient strength of mind to endure the misfortunes of other people. Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and evils to come, but present evils triumph over philosophy. It requires greater virtue to sustain good fortune than bad. The evil which we do, does not draw upon us so many persecutions and so much hatred as our good qualities.. If we had no faults ourselves, we should not have so much pleasure in discovering the faults of others. Nobody is ever so happy or so unhappy as he imagines. The love of jus

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VOL. CIII.-NO. DCXXVII.

tice in most men, is nothing but the fear of suffering from injustice. Many complain of their memory, but Old men delight in uttering good prenone complain of their judgment. cepts to console themselves for being no longer in a condition to set bad examples. The more one loves one's mistress, the nearer one is to hating her. The surest way of being deceived, is to think yourself cleverer and more cunning than anybody else. People are never made so ridiculous by the qualities they possess, as by those which they affect to have. Society could not long subsist if men were not the dupes of one another.. for the evil we have done, as a fear Our repentance is not so much a regret of what may be the consequences.

.

When our vices quit us, we flatter ourselves that we quit our vices.

That which often prevents us from abandoning ourselves to a single vice, is the fact that we have several.

He who lives without folly, is not so wise as he thinks. . . . It is inuch easier to limit one's gratitude than one's hopes and desires. . . In the adversity of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us.

It is not so dangerous to do evil to most men, as to do them too much good. There is no man clever

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ones.

enough to know all the evil which he does. Among the mass of mankind gratitude is nothing but a strong and secret desire for still greater benefits. Whatever good the world may say of us, it never says anything of which we were not previously aware. We confess our little faults, to persuade ourselves that we have no great It is a kind of happiness to know up to what point we should be unhappy. Ourself-love revolts much more against the condemnation of our tastes and habits than of our opinions. The clemency of princes is sometimes exercised for vanitysometimes for idleness-sometimes for fear; and nearly always for the three . . If there were no combined. pride in our own hearts, we should not complain of the pride of others. . . Pride has a greater share than goodness in the remonstances which we make with those who have committed faults. It is not so much to correct them that we speak, as to persuade them that we ourselves are exempt from the faults which we deplore. That which renders the vanity of other people insup

E

The little spice and condiment of cynicism that flavours these and the other Maxims of La Rochefoucauld is not offensive. The bitter is a mild bitter, and not nauseous. The author had the manners and the instincts of a gentleman; and if not quite a Christian in his philosophy, inasmuch as he taught that we all of us love ourselves much better than we love our neighbours, he was no misanthropist, and might possibly have claimed to be a Christian in heart, and to have had his claim allowed, on the plea that his Maxims depicted men as they were, and not as he and Christianity would have had them to be. Whether his philosophy were sound or unsound, it was greatly to the taste of his age. It also helped to form the style, and moulded to a large extent the opinions, of successive writers both in France and in England. We trace the influence of his teachings in Pope and Swift as well as in Voltaire, and in the recorded conversation of the wits, male and female, who twinkled in French and English society prior to the wars that succeeded the great French Revolution, as well as of those wits who distinguished themselves after the peace that followed Waterloo; amongst whom the Prince de Talleyrand was conspicuous in France, and Samuel Rogers, poet and banker, in England. Some of the maxims, not yet collected, of Prince Talleyrand, were quite equal in epigrammatic brilliancy to those of La Rochefoucauld, such as the well-known phrase, borrowed from Voltaire, "Speech

was given to man to conceal his "Gratitude is thoughts;" and,

a keen sense of favours to come (though this is but a neater rendering of the same thought in La Rochefoucauld). "All successful men know how to hold their tongues.' "Zeal is a bad servant." "Everybody hates a man with a grievance." And that all but untranslatable dictum, "Rien ne réussit comme le succès," which the English language fails to render in anything like its original precision.

The cynicism now fashionable has not, however, the airy grace and delicate innuendo of La Rochefoucauld and Talleyrand, or of Lord Melbourne and Samuel Rogers, but displays considerably less wit and a great deal more vulgarity. The people who are busy in moneymaking, and who worship gold for the carnal delights, the ease, the pleasure, the position and the power it will give them when overwearied with the care and the anxiety that attend on the too-hot pursuit, have neither the heart nor the leisure, nor, in a great majority of cases, the intellectual culture, to appreciate the wit that excites no more than a smile, and that sometimes is more apt to produce a sigh. They require a sensation to arouse them. They need coarse buffoonery and broad farce to change the current of their thoughts, and provoke them to laughter. The feeling of reverence for anything but money having ceased to act on their minds, they speak of the things which men formerly held in honour under degrading aliases. Not only are the honesty of men, the virtue of women, and the sanctity of marriage the butts against which vulgar cynics shoot their blunted darts-in this respect ancient and modern cynicism follow the same track-but they will not allow the holiest emotions of our nature to remain undepreciated.

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In their hideous slang the generous man is described as soft," or a "muff;" the confiding as "green.' The word "father" is superseded by "governor ;" and to be in love -which is certainly neither unmanly nor unwomanly, but is so considered by the cynics, whose only experience of it is in the degraded form of lust-is to be "spoony upon some one. They go down among costermongers, and even lower, among thieves, to find epithets for the expression of their thoughts; and the word "friend" disappears from their vocabulary to make room for "pal"-just as if they denied the possibility of friendship, and there were consequently no propriety in naming a thing which had ceased to exist. While to be honestly desirous of virtuous marriage is to be considered " spoony," it is not surprising that the Aspasias, the Phrynes, the Anonymas, and the other dashing hetaire who can drink, smoke, ride steeplechases, and break horses-literally as well as metaphorically-should be of more account than their virtuous and "slow" sisters, who have no such fashionable claims to the regard of "blokes," who like to get as much enjoyment at as little cost as they can, and who do not care to encumber themselves for life with the support of good women, who can bring them no fortunes, and do nothing but make "spoons" of them. This degradation of the public sentiment-this lowering of the dignity of language and of the tone of social intercourse-reflects itself on the stage, where the "lorettes," the " cocottes," and the Traviatas are placed in the front rank of popular favourites. In England we have not yet descended so low as to produce a "Thérèse" to sing libidinous verses for the amusement of men (and women); but the songs which find most favour at our music-halls are by no means of a character to be

Love, marriage, friendship, generosity, courage, were formerly the themes of the poet, and the pervading subjects and sentiments of popular and fashionable song, that pleased our grandfathers and grandmothers in old times, and our fathers and mothers in times that can scarcely be considered old. But in our day, if any such real and earnest topics are mentioned at all by the caterers for public amusement, they are smuggled into notice, surreptitiously as it were, and introduced to us under a comic disguise, as if their authors were ashamed of their subject. Sentimental songs are not to the taste of our age, unless they are sung by mock negroes, with blackened hands and faces, to the accompaniment of the banjo. The touch of farce and caricature tends to bring the sentiment into contempt, and so disposes the public to accept and be pleased with it. Such a pill as a beautiful and noble sentiment will not be swallowed by the "fast people who haunt the music saloons and minor theatres, unless it be coated over with the ludicrous or the absurd, to render it inoffensive. Women, it is true, are still permitted if not encouraged to warble the honest and hearty songs in which our forefathers delighted, though even among them such old-fashioned ideas as love and friendship, and the joys of happy home, are being gradually expurgated from the musical library, and replaced