revival of classical learning had given a revived impulse to the Imperial idea, just as the revival of the Civil Law had done at an earlier time. Of the ideas with which men then looked upon the Empire, Dante, in his work De Monarchia, is the great exponent. It must not be thought for a moment that Dante's subject is monarchy, in the common sense of the word, royal government as opposed to aristocracy or democracy. With him monarchia is synonymous with imperium. There may be many kings and princes, but there is only one monarch, one universal chief, the Roman Emperor. He proves elaborately, in the peculiar style of reasoning current in that age, that an universal monarch is necessary, that the Roman Emperor is of right the universal monarch, that the Emperor does not hold his crown of the Pope, but immediately of God alone. But he has not a word of argument to show that the German King is really the Roman Emperor; that is assumed as a matter of course; there was no need to prove, because nobody doubted, that whatever belonged of right to Augustus Cæsar belonged of right to his legitimate successor, Harry of Luxemburg. On this branch of the argument-one which, to our notions, stood quite as much in need of proof as any of the others-Dante does not vouchsafe a single line. The illusion survived untouched. In Mr. Bryce's words: "The offices of the imperial household, instituted by Constantine the Great, were attached to the noblest families of Germany. The Emperor and Empress, before their coronation at Rome, were lodged in the chambers called those of Augustus and Livia; a bare sword was borne before them by the prætorian prefect; their processions were adorned by the standards, eagles, wolves, and dragons, which had figured in the were possessed by the belief that all things continued as they were from the beginning, that no chasm never to be recrossed lay between them and that ancient world to which they had not ceased to lock back. We who are centuries removed, can see that there had passed a great and wonderful change upon thought, and art, and literature, and politics, and society itself; a change whose best illustration is to be found in the process whereby there arose out of the primitive basilica the Romanesque cathedral, and from’ it in turn the endless varieties of the Gothic. But so gradual was the change, that each generation felt it passing over them no more than a man feels that perpetual transformation by which his .body is renewed from year to year; while the few who had learning enough to study antiquity through its contemporary records, were prevented by the utter want of criticism and of that which we call historical feeling, from seeing how prodigious was the contrast between themselves and those whom they admired. There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwe'ls upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavours to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard. . . . And thus, when we remember that the notion of progress and development, and of change as the necessary condition thereof, was unwelcome or unknown in medieval times, we may better understand, though we do not cease to wonder, how men, never doubting that the political system of antiquity had descended to them, modified indeed, yet in substance the same, should have believed that the Frank, the Saxon, and the Suabian, ruled all Europe by right which seems to us not less fantastic than that fabled charter whereby Alexander the Great bequeathed his Empire, to the Slavic race for the love of Roxalana." We have not room to follow Mr. Bryce through all the stages of the later German history, when the Empire had lost all Roman and imperial character, when the Emperor was again a mere German King, or rather a mere president of a German Confederation. The steps by which Germany sank from a kingdom into a confederation have an interest of their own, but it is one which more closely touches federal than imperial history. Germany is, as far as we know, the only example of a Confederation which arose, not out of the union of elements before distinct, but out of the dissolution of a formerly existing kingdom. From the Peace of Westphalia-we might almost say from the Interregnum onwards-the imperial historian has little more to do than to watch the strange and blind affection with which men clave to the mere name of what had once been great and glorious. And yet we have seen that The philosophy of the matter Mr. Bryce even that name was not without its practical explains in a brilliant passage: train of Hadrian or Theodosius. The constant title of the Emperor himself, according to the style introduced by Probus, was 'semper Augustus,' or 'perpetuus Augustus,' which erring ety. mology translated at all times increaser of the Empire.' [Zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs.] The pontificatus maximus of his predecessors was supposed to be preserved by his admission as a canon of St. Peter's at Rome and St. Mary's at Aachen. Annalists invariably number the place of each sovereign from Augustus downwards. The notion of an uninterrupted succession, which moves the stranger's wondering smile as he sees ranged round the magnificent Golden Hall of Augsburg the portraits of the Cæsars, laurelled, helmeted, and periwigged, from the conqueror of Gaul to the partitioner of Poland, was to those generations not an article of faith only because its denial was inconceivable." "In truth, through all that period which we call the Dark and Middle Ages men's minds effect. If, in Mr. Bryce's emphatic words, "the German Kingdom broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire," it was March, about the worth of the old system has no bearing upon them at all. The day of imperial greatness was already past when Rudolf of the what may be called the Austrian period, from first Hapsburg reached the throne; while during Maximilian to Francis II., the Holy Empire was to Germany a mere clog and incumbrance, which the unhappy nation bore, because she knew not how to rid herself of it. The Germans are welcome to appeal to the old Empire to prove that they were once a united people. Nor is there twelfth century with those of the nineteenth, any harm in their comparing the politics of the although to argue from the one to the other But the one thing which is wholly absurd is to seems to betray a want of historical judgment. make Francis Joseph of Austria the successor of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, and justify the most sordid and ungenial of modern despotisms by the example of the mirror of medieval chivalry, the noblest creation of medieval thought." certainly the name of the Roman Empire | modern Austria, the truth is that this dispute which hindered the severed pieces from altogether flying asunder. And the recollection of the Empire works still in modern politics, though we fear more for evil than for good. Patriotic Germans indeed look back with a sigh to the days when Germany was great and united under her Ottos and her Henries, but these are remembrances of the Kingdom rather than of the Empire. The memory of the Empire is mainly used in modern times to prop up the position of the two upstart powers which now venture to profane the Imperial title. Because Gaul was once a German province, the Lord of Paris would have us believe that the successor of Charles is to be found among a people who in the days of the great Emperor had no national being. Because certain Austrian Dukes were chosen Roman Emperors, we are called upon, sometimes to condemn the great Frederick as a forerunner of Francis Joseph, sometimes to justify Francis Joseph as a successor of the great Frederick. We will wind up with the fervid and eloquent comments of Mr. Bryce on this latter head. A more vigorous denunciation of the great Austrian imposture we have seldom come across "Austria has indeed, in some things, but too faithfully reproduced the policy of the Saxon and Suabian Cæsars. Like her, they oppressed and insulted the Italian people: but it was in the defence of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. Like her, they lusted after a dominion over the races on their borders, but that dominion was to them a means of spreading civilisation and religion in savage countries, not of pampering upon their revenues a hated court and aristocracy. Like her, they strove to maintain a strong government at home, but they did it when a strong government was the first of political blessings. Like her, they gathered and maintained vast armies; but those armies were composed of knights and barons who lived for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuating their own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another nationality. They sinned grievously, no doubt, but they sinned in the dim twilight of a half-barbarous age, not in the noonday blaze of modern civilisation. The enthusiasm for medieval faith and simplicity which was so. fervid some years ago, has run its course, and is not likely soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the best of them, were in some respects little better than savages. But when he approaches more recent times, and sees how, during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with their subjects, and with each other, he will forget the ferocity of the Middle Ages, in horror at the heartlessness, the treachery, the injustice all the more odious because it sometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the annals of the military monarchies of Europe. With regard, however, to the pretensions of ART. VIII.-1. Etchings and Sketchings. 2. Sketches Contributed to Bell's Life. 5. The Children of the Mobility. 6. The Comic Latin Grammar. By PER- 8. Bentley's Miscellany. For many years. By By 9. The Marchioness de Brinvilliers. 14. The Militiaman Abroad. 17. Seeley's Porcelain Tower. 18, Christmas Numbers of the London Illustrated News. By DOUGLAS 19. The Quizziology of the British Drama. 25. The Book of British Song. 28. Punch's Pocket-Book. Up to Etchings and small woodcuts. 29. Douglas Jerrold's Collected Works. 30. The Earlier Volumes of Once a Week. 31. Jack Brag. By THEODORE HOOK. 1864. | Jean Paul, who says it is the opposite of the sublime, the infinitely great, and is therefore the infinitely little; and Kant, who gives it as the sudden conversion into nothing of a long raised and highly-wrought expectation; many have been the attempts to unsphere the spirit of a joke and make it tell its secret; but we agree with our excellent and judicious 32. Journey to Pau. By Hon. ERSKINE MURRAY. 33. The Month. By ALBERT SMITH. 34. The Rising Generation: A Series of friend Quinctilian, that its ratio is at best Twelve Large Coloured Plates. If man is made to mourn, he also, poor fellow! and without doubt therefore, is made to laugh. He needs it all, and he begets it. For human nature may say of herself in the words of the ballad, "Werena my heart licht, I wad die." Man is the only animal that laughs; it is as peculiar to him as his chin and his hippocampus minor. The perception of a joke, the smile, the sense of the ludicrous, the quiet laugh, the roar of laughter, are all our own; and we may be laughed as well as tickled to death, as in the story of the French nun of mature years, who, during a vehement fit of laughter, was observed by her sisters to sit suddenly still and look very "gash" (like the Laird of Garscaddent), this being considered a farther part of the joke, when they found she was elsewhere. In books, old and new, there is no end of philosophizing upon the ludicrous and its cause; from Aristotle, who says it is some error in truth or propriety, but at the same time neither painful nor pernicious; and Cicero, who defines it as that which, without impropriety, notes and exposes an impropriety; to No other animal has a chin proper, and it is a comfort, in its own small way, that Mr. Huxley has not yet found the lesser sea horse in our grand father's brain. + Vide Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences. anceps. There is a certain robust felicity about old Hobbes's saying, that "it is a sudden glory, or sense of eminency above others or our former selves." There is no doubt at least about the suddenness and the glory; all true laughter must be involuntary, must come and go as it lists, must take us and shake us heartily and by surprise. No man can laugh any more than he can sneeze at will, and he has nearly as little to do with its ending-it dies out, disdaining to be killed. He may grin and guffaw, because these are worked by muscles under the dominion of volition, but your diaphragm, the midriff, into which your joker pokes his elbow, he is the great organ of genuine laughter and the sudden glory, and he as you all know, when made absurd by hiccup, is masterless as the wind, "untamable as flies;" therefore is he called by the grave Haller, nobilissimus post cor musculus; for ladies and gentlemen, your heart is only a (often very) hollow muscle. If you wish to know what is done in your interior when you laugh, here it is from Dr. Carpenter. He classes it along with sobbing and hiccup, and says: "In it the muscles of expiration are in convulsive movement, more or less violent, and send out the breath in a series of jerks, the glottis being open," the glottis being the little chink at the top of the windpipe. As to the mental impression on the sensorium that sets these jerks agoing, and arches that noble muscle, we, as already said, think it may be left to a specific sense of its own, and that laughter is the effect and very often the canse of the laughable, and therefore of itself-a definition which has the merit of being self-contained. But is it not well that we are made to laugh, that, from the first sleepy gleam moving like sunshine over an infant's cheek, to the cheery and feeble chirrup of his great-grandfather by the fireside, we laugh at the laughable, when the depths of our strange nature are dappled and rippled, or tossed into wildest laughter by anything, so that it be droll, just as we shudder when soused with cold water-because we can't help it. But we are drifting into disquisition and must beware. that the pneumogastric and phrenic nerves What is it to us or the public are the telegraphs from their head-quarters in the brain to this same midriff-that if cut, | laughs right out, loud and strong, may be a there would be an end of our funny messages, question as hard to answer as the why he and of a good deal more; that the musculus curls up his nose when tickled with a straw, nobilissimus, if wounded in its feelings from or sneezes when he looks at the sun; but it without or from within, takes to outrageous is not hard to be thankful for the joke, and laughter of the dreariest sort; that if any- for the tickle, and for the sneeze. Our busithing goes wrong at the central thalami, as ness rather is now gratefully to acknowledge. they are called, of these nerves, the vehicles the singular genius, the great personal and of will and feeling, they too make sad fools of artistic worth of one of our best masters of themselves by sending down absurd, incohe- "heart-easing mirth," than to discourse upon rent telegrams "at lairge "? the why and how he makes us laugh so pleasantly, so wholesomely and well,-and to deplore along with all his friends (who has not in him lost a friend ?), his sudden and irreparable loss. It was as if something personal to every one was gone; as if a fruit we all ate and rejoiced in had vanished for ever; a something good and cheery, and to be thankful for, which came every week as sure as Thursday-never to come again. Our only return to him for all his unfailing goodness and cheer, is the memory of the heart, and he has it if any man in the British empire has. The noble, honest, kindly, diligent, sound-hearted, modest, and manly John Leech-the very incarnation in look, character, and work of the best in an Englishman. One might be diffuse upon the various ways in which laughter seizes upon and deals with mankind; how it excruciates some, making them look and yell as if caught in a trap. How a man takes to crowing like a cock, or as if under permanent hooping-cough, ending his series of explosions victoriously with his well-known "clarion wild and shrill." How provocative of laughter such a musical performance always is to his friends, leading them to lay snares for him. We knew an excellent man-a country doctor-who, if wanted in the village, might be traced out by his convivial crow. It was droll to observe him resisting internally and on the sly the beginnings of his bravura; how it always prevailed. How another friend, huge, learned, and wise, whom laughter seizes and rends, is made desperate, and at times ends in crashing his chair, and concluding his burst on its ruins, and on the floor. In houses where he is familiar, a special chair is set for him, braced with iron for the stress. Then one might discourse on the uses of laughter as a muscular exercise; on its drawing into action lazy muscles, supernumeraries, which get off easily under ordinary circumstances; how much good the convulsive succussion of the whole man does to his chylopoietic and other viscera; how it laughs to scorn care and malaise of all kinds; how it makes you cry without sorrow, and ache every inch of you without wrong done to any one; how it clears the liver, enlivens the spleen, and makes the very cockles of the heart to tingle. By the bye, what are these cockles of tradition, but the columnæ carneæ, that pull away at the valves, and keep all things tight? But why should we trouble ourselves and you with either the physiology or the philosophy of laughter, when all that anybody needs to say or to hear, is said, so as to make all after saying hopeless and needless, by Sidney Smith, in his two chapters on Wit and Humour, in his Notes of Lectures on Moral Philosophy? Why it is that when any one-except possibly Mr. Tupper-hears for the first time, that wisest of wits' joke to his doctor, when told by him to "take a walk on an empty stomach;"-" on whose ?"-he As there is and has always been, since we had letters or art of our own, a rich abounding power and sense of humour and of fun in the English nature; so ever since that same nature was pleased to divert and express itself and its jokes in art as well as in books, we have had no lack of depicters of the droll, the odd, the terrible, and the queer. Hogarth is the first and greatest of thein all, the greatest master inh is own terribile via the world has ever seen. If you want to know his worth and the exquisite beauty of his colouring, study his pictures, and possess his prints, and read Charles Lamb on his genius. Then came the savage Gillray, strong and coarse as Churchill, the very Tipton Slasher of political caricature; then we had Bunbury, Rowlandson, and Woodward, more violent than strong, more odd than droll, and often more disgusting than either. Smirke, with his delicate, pure, pleasant humour, as seen in his plates to Don Quixote, which are not unworthy of that marvellous book, the most deeply and exquisitely humorous piece of genius in all literature; then Edwin Landseer's Monkeyana, forgotten by, and we fear unknown to many, so wickedly funny, so awfully human, as almost to convert us to Mr. Huxley's pedigree-The Duel, for instance. Then we had Henry Alken in the Hunting Field, and poor Heath, the ex-Captain of Dragoons, facile and profuse, unscrupulous and clever. Then the greatest since Hogarth, though limited in range and tending to excess, George Cruickshank, who happily still lives and plies his matchless needle; it would take an entire paper to expound his keen, penetrating power, his moral intensity, his gift of wild grimace, the dexterity and supersubtlety of his etching, its firm and delicate lines. Then came poor short-lived tragical Seymour, whom Thackeray wished to succeed as artist to Pickwick; he embodied Pickwick as did "Phiz,"-Hablot Browne, Messrs. Quilp and Pecksniff, and Micky Free, and whose steeple-chasing Irish cocktails we all know and relish; but his manner is too much for him and for us, and his ideas are neither deep nor copious, hence everlasting and weak repetitions of himself. Kenny Meadows, with more genius, especially for fiends and all eldritch fancies, and still more mannerism. Sibson and Hood, whose draw ings were quaint and queer enough, but his words better and queerer. Thackeray, very great, answering wonderfully his own idea. We wonder that his Snobs and Modern Novelists and miscellaneous papers were ever published without his own cuts. What would Mrs. Perkins' Ball be without The Mulligan, as the spread-eagle, frantic and glorious, doing the mazurka, without Miss Bunyon, and them all; and the good little Nightingale, singing "Home, Sweet Home" to that young, premature brute Hewlett, in Dr. Birch. But we have already recorded our estimate of Mr. Thackeray's worth as an artist;* and all his drolleries and quaint bits of himself, his comic melancholy, his wistful children, his terrific soldans in the early Punches. They should all be collected, wherever he escapes from his pen to his pencil, they should never be divorced. Then Doyle, with his wealth of dainty phantasies, his glamourie, his wonderful power of expressing the weird and uncanny, his fairies and goblins, his enchanted castles and maidens, his plump caracolling pony chargers, his charm of colour and of unearthly beauty in his water-colours. No one is more thoroughly himself and alone than Doyle. We need only name his father, "H. B.," the master of gentlemanly, political satire,-as Gillray was of brutal. Tenniel we still have, excellent, careful, and often strong and effective; but more an artist and a draughtsman than a genius or a humourist. John Leech is different from all these, and, taken as a whole, surpasses them all, even Cruickshank, and seats himself next, though below, William Hogarth. Well might Thackeray, in his delightful notice of his friend and fellow-Carthusian in the Quarterly, say, "There is no blinking the fact, that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right *North British Review, Feb. 1864. hand man. Fancy a number of Punch without Leech's picture! What would you give for it?" This was said ten years ago. How much more true it is now! We don't need to fancy it any longer! And yet, doubtless, nature is already preparing some one else— she is for ever filling her horn-whom we shall never think better, or in his own way, half so good, but who like him will be, let us trust, new and true, modest and good; let us, meanwhile, rest and be thankful, and look back on the past. We'll move on by and bye-"to fresh fields and pastures new"we suppose, and hope. We are not going to give a biography, or a studied appraisement of this great artist,that has been already well done in the Cornhill,-and we trust the mighty "J. O." who knew him and loved him as a brother, and whose strong and fine hand-its truth, nicety, and power, we think we recognise in an admirable short notice of Leech as one of the "Men of Mark," in the London Journal of May 31, 1862-may employ his leisure in giving us a memorial of his friend. No one could do it better, not even the judicious Tom Taylor, and it is worth his while, to go down the great stream side by side with such a man. All that we shall now do is to give some particulars, not, so far as we know, given to the public, and end with a few selected woodcuts from Punchillustrative of his various moods and giftsfor which we are indebted to the kindness of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans,*-two men to whom and to whose noble generosity and enterprise we owe it that Punch is what he is; men who have made their relation to him and to his staff of writers and artists, a labour of love; dealing in everything, from the quality of the paper up to the genius, with truly disinterested liberality; and who, to give only one instance, must have given Mr. Leech, during his twenty-three years' connexion with them, upwards of £40,000, money richly deserved, and well won, for no money could pay in full what he was to them and to us; but still, not the less honourable to them than to him.f gether too great to allow of their being published *The cost of re-engraving these cuts is altoin our reprint.-[AM. PUBS.] When the history of the rise and progress of Punch comes to be written, it will be found that the Weekly Dinner has been one of the chief things foundation of that journal it has been the habit of the contributors every Wednesday to dine together. In the winter months, the dinner is usually held in the front room of the first floor of No. 11, Bouverie proprietors, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. SomeStreet, Whitefriars,-the business offices of the which contributed to its success. Almost from the times these dinners are held at the Bedford Hotel, Covent Garden. During the summer months, it is |