crosses " for his sisters. What prettier, warmer picture can be called to mind than this handsome, gallant, light-hearted ladhandsomer, Jane jealously insists, than all the rest of the family-bringing back to his quiet country home these innocent trophies of victory? Surely it was the pleasure Miss Austen felt in that "topaze' cross, that little golden chain, which found such eloquent expression in Fanny Price's mingled rapture and distress when her sailor brother brought her the amber cross from Sicily, and Edmund Bertram offered her, too late, the chain on which to hang it. It is a splendid reward that lies in wait for boyish generosity when the sister chances to be one of the immortals, and hands down to generations of readers the charming record of her gratitude and love.

By the side of this thoroughly English picture should be placed, in justice and in harmony, another which is as thoroughly German,Rahel Varnhagen sending to her brother money to bring him to Berlin. The letter which accompanies this sisterly gift is one of the most touching in literature.

HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

NATIONS, like individuals, stand self-betrayed in their pastimes and their jests. The ancient historians recognized this truth, and thought it well worth their while to gossip pleasantly into the ears of attentive and grateful generations. Cleopatra playfully outwitting Anthony by fastening a salted fish to the boastful angler's hook is no less clear to us than Cleopatra sternly outwitting Cæsar with the poison of the asp, and we honor Plutarch for confiding both these details to the world. Their verity has nothing to do with their value or our satisfaction. The medieval chroniclers listened rapturously to the clamor of battle, and found all else but war too trivial for their pens. The modern scholar produces that pitiless array of facts known as constitutional history; and labors under the strange delusion that acts of Parliament, or acts of Congress, reform bills, and political pamphlets represent his country's life. If this sordid

devotion to the concrete suffers no abatement, the intelligent reader of the future will be compelled to reconstruct the nineteenth century from the pages of "Punch" and "Life," from faded play-bills, the records of the race-track, and the inextinguishable echo of dead laughter.

For man lives in his recreations, and is revealed to us by the search-light of an epigram. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure. The laugh that we enjoy at our own expense betrays us to the rest of the world, and the humorists of England and America have been long employed in pointing out with derisive fingers their own, and not their neighbor's shortcomings. If we are more reckless in our satire, and more amused at our own wit, it is because we are better tempered, and newer to the game. The delight of being a nation, and a very big nation at that, has not yet with us lost all the charm of novelty, and we pelt one another with ridicule after the joyously aggressive fashion of schoolboys pelting one another with snowballs. Already