Thou art thy brother's keeper,
                 War, pestilence, and dearth,
             These besoms of the Sweeper
                 Invade the homes of earth.
              A blackened path and sterile
                 Conducts them to thy door,
              And at thy proper peril,
                 Dost thou neglect the poor!

A CANNY BOOK.

WARS, rumours of wars, plagues, famines,
fires, civil commotions, and human wickedness,
notwithstanding, this dear old island we
live in has done much, in each successive age
of its history to merit and maintain its name
of " merry England." There is in the
English character a rich vein of dry, quietly
chuckling humour and merriment—a sober
satire—a business-like jocoseness, very
different from the uneasy though sparkling,
elaborated though facund wit of the French.
Old and young women, and even little
children, are witty in France; valets-de-
chambre shine in epigram, and chambermaids
in repartee; French caricatures are pointed
and stinging, French comedies and
vaudevilles spirituel and epigrammatic; but they
are seldom humorous and never funny. The
substitute for fun in France is coarseness;
and a "chanson grivois" is far less comic
than untranslatable.

I have heard of " farceurs " and "spruch-
sprechers," zanies, buffoons, and court-fools,
on the continent in all ages; but I can claim
for England an almost entire monopoly of the
"merry men," " waggish fellows," " droll
knaves," "pleasant jests," "diverting histories
of one that did such and such a thing,"
"humorous ballads," " new joke books,"
"comical relations," and "laughable
anecdotes," of this and of preceding ages. Some
of Messer Boccaccio's heroes and stories were
in truth merry enough, but of what order of
merriment are they? There must have been
a "merry man " in Verona, sometime husband
to a respectable elderly female that was nurse
to the Lady Juliet; his widow vouched for
his merriment, but that is all we know of
him. For aught we can tell he might have
been the ancestor of the Signor N.N. (or non
nominato) who plays the small parts in the
Italian Operas; and after all he was but a
creation of our Shakspeare's brain—a fictitious
merry man transplanted for the nonce
to the soil of Italy, but of English origin and
antecedents.

Long may the " merry men " of England
live. There is scarcely a family in London
without a funny uncle or a brother-in-law
who is a confirmed wag; no dinner-table is
complete without a funny story-teller, no
evening party properly framed without a
guest essentially facetious. There is always
one abnormally funny man in the pit of every
theatre, who is a pleasant pestilence, and
makes laughter contagious. In every crowd
waiting for a procession, watching a fire,
hearing an election speech, your wag is
unfailingly present; even the stern board of
parish officials has its jocular guardian; the
county jail has its one turnkey, at least,
"fond of a joke;" and Mr. Tressels, the
undertaker, has, I will be bound, more than
one " comical chap " among his gentlemen in
black.

More than this, there is not a dull, ignorant,
clodhopping little village in England without,
its merry fellow, and traditions of waggish
men and sayings. Not later than last
Thursday, sitting on a knoll in a green
churchyard in Kent, and entertaining myself
with quiet talk with the gravecligger (who
must either have read Hamlet, and so "made
up " for the part, or else have been a direct
descendant of Shakspeare's gravedigger, for
he was all waistcoats and sententious witticisms),
I had pointed out to me a tombstone,
which as my informant averred, " parties had
come to see," as far as from the East Injies.
Perusing it, I found a comfortable inscription
"to the pleasant memory of Peter Isnell,
clerk of this parish." He was a merry man,
was Peter, for a prodigious number of years,
the inscription went on to say, and dropped
down dead, " going to a wedding," at a ripe
old age. A punning rhyming stanza on the
word "Amen," which Peter had passed so-
many years of his life in chanting, followed
this announcement; but I have forgotten it ,
and neglected to transcribe it. I know the
epitaph concluded with a statement that the
inhabitants of the parish had liberally subscribed
to raise this stone in perpetuation of Peter's
"pleasant memory." I should like to have
known Peter. There are many more village
churchyards in England, where similar
pleasant fellows repose, undisturbed by the
pattering of the laughing children's feet, and
the hoofs of the clergyman's cob, browsing
amongst the graves. And there are many
alive too, I am glad to say, in quiet little out
of the way hamlets—merry fellows who come
with hot faces, in their shirt sleeves into the
village alehouse on summer afternoons, and
season the cool ale with jests and pleasant
sayings. And there are plenty more of
country people to appreciate these facetious
villagers living, and epitaphise them dead:
cotton, cog-wheels, strikes and lock-outs
notwithstanding.

I have lately been dawdling through an
old book (it is impossible to read one through
with the fierce thirsty earnestness with which
you attack a new volume)—a little old, weazen,
yellow-leaved book, commemorating the
pleasantries of the remarkably business-like
and money-making waggish town of " canny
Newcastle." Incompatible as the two first
qualities would seem with the last, " canny"
Newcastle possesses them all. Those who
have the pleasure of numbering among their
friends some of those worthy fellows with
the stalwart forms, the gruff voices, the cool