number of human pegs thrust forcibly into holes which do not fit them, and the world’s work suffers proportionately from this misapplication of energy.  The mischief is abundantly clear, but the remedy, if we do not shut our eyes to it, is tolerably clear also.  Just as this condition of things is largely due to our unscientific neglect of variations in character and the wooden system of education which this neglect has produced, so we may expect to see its evils disappear by an abolition of the one and a reform of the other.  If the world be indeed a stage, with all humanity for its corps dramatique it must surely be well for the success of the performance that the cast should take account of individual aptitudes, and that to each player should be allotted the part which he can best support in the great drama of Life.

NORMAN PEARSON.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

“The Man who Laughs.”

The degree of culture and good breeding which a man possesses may be very correctly determined by the way he laughs.  The primeval savage, from whom we trace descent, was distinguished above everything else by his demonstrativeness; and there is much in our present type of social manners and conduct which betrays our barbarous origin.  The brute-like sounds that escape from the human throat in the exercise of laughter, the coarse guffaw, the hoarse chuckle, and the high, cackling tones in which many of the feminine half of the world express their sense of amusement, attest very painfully the animal nature within us.  It was Emerson, I believe, who expressed a dislike of all loud laughter; and it is difficult to imagine the scene or occasion which could draw from that serene and even-minded philosopher a broader expression of amusement than that conveyed in the “inscrutable smile” which Whipple describes as his most characteristic feature.  Yet Emerson was by no means wanting in appreciation of the comic.  On the contrary, he had an abiding sense of humor, and it was this—­a keen and lively perception of the grotesque, derived as part of his Yankee inheritance—­that kept him from uniting in many of the extravagant reform movements of the day.  Few of us, however, even under the sanction of an Emerson, would wish to dispense with all sound of laughter.

The memory of a friend’s voice, in which certain laughing notes and tones are inextricably mingled with the graver inflections of common speech, is almost as dear as the vision of his countenance or the warm pressure of his hand.  Yet among such remembrances we hold others, of those from whom the sound of open laughter is seldom heard, the absence of which, however, denotes no diminished sense of the humorous and amusing.  A quick, responsive smile, a flash or glance of the eye, a kindling countenance, serve as substitutes for true laughter, and we do not miss the sound of that which is supplied in a finer and often truer quality.