of Babel. Possibly, the pressure of this primeval ordinance takes from us any strong constraining desire to please, except under circumstances tempting to our vanity, and makes us realise the trouble of being agreeable-which is, indeed, to not a few the hardest thing they are ever put to. The world must be peopled, and if every man had liked his neighbour, enjoyed his company, and found something to say to him, people would have stuck together like bees in a swarm, and three parts of the earth to this day would have been desert. I STUDY OF CHARACTER. WE hear a great deal about knowledge of character, and it is, no doubt, a fine thing to suppose ourselves possessed of an insight into the motives and interior mechanism of all our acquaintance; but we have not that entire faith in it as a genuine attainment—as a practical substantial benefit, as a protection from mistake, as a guide through life, with which its pretensions ought to inspire us. The characters men draw in books hang together in a wonderful harmony of parts. If we had to deal with them we should know what we were about. They are amazingly consistent, and we exclaim, How natural! what a wonderful knowledge of human nature has Scott, or Richardson, or Dickens, or Charlotte Bronté! But the difficulty in real life is that people are not natural-that they are inconsistent— that their deviations from their proper selves would disgrace a novel and spoil any author's reputation. Take some men and compare them one year with another, one day with another, and there is absolutely scarce a trace of the former man. Hamlet puzzles the commentators because he is not always reconcilable with himself; but, surely, all of us can point out some one or more compared with whom Hamlet is plain sailing. We suspect that great artists, attempting to draw from life, feel this-are embarrassed with the incongruities and perversities of humanity, and have to convey an idea as they can, by antithesis and by uniting opposites. Even Shakespeare has to describe Wolsey by this method. We may always detect a real character amongst shadows in a novel by his want of harmony. The more true he is to the writer's observation, the less natural he is—that is, if it be nature for your actions to follow in a sort of necessary sequence from your qualities. So Pope felt embarrassed with his mighty subject, and hopeless of reducing the study to a science : "See the same man in vigour, or the gout, Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall." It is impossible to draw such characters. They are either a satire, like Pope's Wharton and Dryden's Villiers, or they are slurred over, all blemishes and puzzles lost under a glaze of encomium. Charles Lamb has a pretty attempt at a portrait of an uncle in 'My Relations,' wherein "he limps," after Sterne, “in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talents;" but the result is, that we feel the man would be intolerable to us, though the writer "would not have him one jot or tittle other than he is." Thus he has failed to convey his idea, as every one must who attempts to draw a character by the process of pairing contradictory qualities. From Bacon's Essays we might infer that men studied character in his day with a very deliberate intention of getting some substantial good by it. He has a dozen excellent recipes for turning a man round your thumb. "If you would work any man, you must either know his nature or his fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him; or his weakness and disadvantages, and so awe him," and so on; but it has been found that arts reduced to rule do not go much way in informing men what is within the smooth exterior of their friends and neighbours. No doubt experience teaches men, under favourable circumstances, to get the knack of all this, though diplomatists have left off imparting their discoveries; but the study of character does not progress as a written science. Not inquiries into the nature of man, physiognomy, phrenology, theories of temperaments, nor the rest of it, advance us one step beyond the old instinct which belongs to some people, and not to others, which fails the oftenest in all difficult crises, and which no one can impart to his fellow. However, every one assumes himself to have a share of this instinct. Few of us would like to be supposed wholly in the dark as to the inner workings of the minds with which we have to do, though the knowledge we assume implies some sense of partial superiority, the presumption of some vantage-ground lifting us above the object of our survey. We read, we interpret, we combine, we reconcile, we penetrate, and, consciously or unconsciously, we are perpetually occupied with the distinct features and peculiarities of that portion of the human family that comes under our observation. Perhaps when most earnestly at work we are least aware of what we are doing. The more intimate and habitual our scrutiny, and the more interest or affection stimulate and quicken our perception, the less we realise our occupation. Domestic affection, indeed, has lost some of its delicacy when members of a family get up one another's character from the point of view of a deliberate survey. Still, we do come to such an acquaintance with our subject that we may be said to know him in that phase of life under which we contemplate him; but here we stop. Knowledge of character, to be real-to show true, thorough insight—ought to be able to prophesy; it ought to embrace such a view of principles of action, inborn and acquired qualities, natural bias and subjection to influence, as to be able to foresee how circumstances will tell on any mind or temper with which we profess to be acquainted. But who can do this? Who can separate native character from the bands of habit and the ties of society? Which of us knows himself so well as to guess what he would be, and do, and think, when put out of his present way of life?-much less what others would do; for whatever may be said of self-deception, it is certain that every man knows secrets about himself which no one |