Should a time, however, arrive when balloons shall be equally safe and guidable, steerable against the wind, &c., (and who, in this age of science and steam-engines, shall say there will not?) it is very pleasant to fancy one's self keeping one's balloon, like a carriage, ordering it hither and thither, visiting one's friends over the house-tops, and "looking in," not at the street door, but at the drawingroom window, &c. The poet wishes that he could fly; so that when pleasure flagged in the East, he might

"Order his wings, and be off to the West."

This undoubtedly would be pleasanter; more convenient, and not so expensive. But he might have both; and wings, compared with a balloon, would be like horse-keeping, compared with a carriage. Beaux, instead of cantering beside barouches, would then flutter three miles high by the side of a car; and a hero in a novel would gloriously catch his mistress in his arms, if her balloon burst, and convey her safely to earth, as Mercury did Psyche. People would then be accused, not of running, but of flying after the girls; and we should see an air-lounger fifty feet above Regent Street, pursuing some maid-servant, or pretty milliner, in and out the chimneys.*

"I have fully considered the project of these our modern Dædalists," says Addison, in the "Guardian,” “and am resolved so far to discourage it, as to prevent any person from flying in my time. It would fill the world with innumerable immoralities, and give such occasions for intrigues, as people cannot meet with who have nothing but legs to carry them. You should have a couple of lovers making a midnight assignation upon the top of the monument, and see the cupola of St. Paul's covered with both sexes, like the outside of a pigeonhouse. Nothing would be more frequent than to see a beau flying in at a garret window, or a gallant giving chase to his mistress, like a hawk after a lark. There would be no walking in a shady wood without springing a covey of toasts. The poor husband could not dream what was doing over his head: if he were jealous, indeed, he might clip his wife's wings; . . . what cou

But war! What a horrible thing to be shot in a balloon! To "fall gloriously" that way, in battle!

"There was mounting 'mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;

Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they 'rose,' and they ran." Think of two armies, or navies rather, meeting over Salisbury Plain, and commencing their broadsides! What a tumbling forth of bodies and cocked hats; of mid-balloonmen, and admirals of the sky-blue! "Sky-scraper" would then indeed be a proper term for the top of a vessel; and "Pegasus," and "Bellerophon,” names to some purpose. But war must go out, as nations advance, whether they arrive at these altitudes or not. Peaceful railroads will supersede hostile inroads (as old Fuller would have said): nations will no more go to war, when they become such close neighbors and their interests are so bound up together, than Middlesex will fight with Surrey, or tradesmen with their employers.

ON THE TALKING OF NONSENSE.

HERE is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense. Nonsense, in the bad sense of the word, like certain suspicious ladies, is very fond of bestowing its own appellation, — particularly upon what renders other persons agreeable.

cern would the father of a family be in all the time his daughter was upon the wing? Every heiress must have an old woman flying at her heels. In short, the whole air would be full of this kind of gibier, as the French call it." - ED.

But nonsense, in the good sense of the word, is a very sensible thing in its season; and is only confounded with the other by people of a shallow gravity, who cannot afford to joke.

These gentlemen live upon credit, and would not have it inquired into. They are perpetual beggars of the question. They are grave, not because they think, or feel the contrast of mirth, for then they would feel the mirth itself; but because gravity is their safest mode of behavior. They must keep their minds sitting still, because they are incapable of a motion that is not awkward. They are waxen images among the living, the deception is undone, if the others stir, or hollow vessels covered up, which may be taken for full ones,—the collision of wit jars against them, and strikes out their hollowness.

In fact, the difference between nonsense not worth talking, and nonsense worth it, is simply this: the former is the result of a want of ideas, the latter of a superabundance of them. This is remarkably exemplified by Swift's "Polite Conversation," in which the dialogue, though intended to be a tissue of the greatest nonsense in request with shallow merriment, is in reality full of ideas, and many of them very humorous; but then they are all commonplace, and have been said so often, that the thing uppermost in your mind is the inability of the speakers to utter a sentence of their own; - they have no ideas at all. Many of the jokes and similes in that treatise are still the current coin of the shallow; though they are now pretty much confined to gossips of an inferior order, and the upper part of the lower classes.

On the other hand, the wildest rattling, as it is called, in which men of sense find entertainment, consists of nothing but a quick and original succession of ideas,—a

finding, as it were, of something in nothing, a rapid turning of the hearer's mind to some new face of thought and sparkling imagery. The man of shallow gravity, besides an uneasy half-consciousness that he has nothing of the sort about him, is too dull of perception to see the delicate links between one thought and another; and he takes that for a mere chaos of laughing jargon, in which finer apprehensions perceive as much delightful association, as men of musical taste do in the most tricksome harmonies and accompaniments of Mozart or Beethoven. Between such gravity and such mirth, there is as much difference as between the driest and dreariest psalmody, and that exquisite laughing trio, — E voi ridete, — which is sung in Cosi Fan Tutte. A quaker's coat and a garden are not more dissimilar; nor a death-bell, and the birds after a sunny shower.

It is on such occasions indeed that we enjoy the perfection of what is agreeable in humanity, — the harmony of mind and body, -intellect and animal spirits. Accordingly the greatest geniuses appear to have been proficients in this kind of nonsense, and to have delighted in dwelling upon it, and attributing it to their favorites. Virgil is no joker, but Homer is: and there is the same difference between their heroes, Æneas and Achilles, the latter of whom is also a player on the harp. Venus, the most delightful of the goddesses, is philomeides, the laughterloving; an epithet, by the bye, which might give a good hint to a number of very respectable ladies, "who love their lords," but who are too apt to let ladies less respectable run away with them. Horace represents Pleasantry as fluttering about Venus in company with Cupid, –

Quem Focus circumvolat, et Cupido;

and these are followed by Youth, the enjoyer of animal

spirits, and by Mercury, the god of persuasion. There is the same difference between Tasso and Ariosto as between Virgil and Homer; that is to say, the latter proves his greater genius by a completer and more various hold on the feelings, and has not only a fresher spirit of Nature about him, but a truer, because a happier; for the want of this enjoyment is at once a defect and a deterioration. It is more or less a disease of the blood; · — a falling off from the pure and uncontradicted blithesomeness of childhood; a hampering of the mind with the altered nerves; dust gathered in the watch, and perplexing our passing hours.

It may be thought a begging of the question to mention Anacreon, since he made an absolute business of mirth and enjoyment, and sat down systematically to laugh as well as to drink. But on that very account, perhaps, his case is still more in point; and Plato, one of the gravest, but not the shallowest, of philosophers, gave him the title of the Wise. The disciple of Socrates appears also to have been a great enjoyer of Aristophanes; and the divine Socrates himself was a wit and a joker.

But the divine Shakespeare ;- the man to whom we go for every thing, and are sure to find it, grave, melancholy, or merry, what said he to this exquisite kind of nonsense? Perhaps next to his passion for detecting nature, and over-informing it with poetry, he took delight in pursuing a joke; and the lowest scenes of his in this way say more to men whose faculties are fresh about them, and who prefer enjoyment to criticism, than the most doting of commentators can find out. They are instances of his animal spirits, of his sociality, of his passion for giving and receiving pleasure,—of his enjoyment of something wiser than wisdom.