sustained enthusiasm, it is rather because we yawn than because we laugh. Unlike Emerson, we are glad to be amused, only the task of amusing us grows harder day by day; and Justin McCarthy's languid heroine, who declines to get up in the morning because she has so often been up before, is but an exhaustive instance of the inconveniences of modern satiety. When we read of the Oxford students beleaguering the bookshops in excited crowds for the first copies of Rokeby and Childe Harold, fighting over the precious volumes, and betting recklessly on their rival sales, we wonder whether either Lord Tennyson's or Mr. Browning's latest effusions created any such tumult among the undergraduates of to-day, or wiled away their money from more legitimate subjects of speculation. Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mortality, answered indignantly, "Opinion! We did not one of us go to bed last night! Nothing slept but my gout." Yet Rokeby and Childe Harold are both in sad disgrace with modern critics, and Old Mortality stands gathering dust upon our bookshelves. Mr. Howell's, who ought to
