never yet the prize of those whose only care is to avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popular favour are
by the twin gates of laughter and tears. Pathos knits the soul and
braces the nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies the
sympathies; the counterfeits of these qualities work the opposite
effects. It is comparatively easy to appeal to passive emotions,
to play upon the melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to
encourage the narrow mind to dispense a patron's laughter from the
vantage-ground of its own small preconceptions. Our annual crop of
sentimentalists and mirth-makers supplies the reading public with
food. Tragedy, which brings the naked soul face to face with the
austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns the light inward and
dissipates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem, have long
since given way on the public stage to the flattery of Melodrama,
under many names. In the books he reads and in the plays he sees
the average man recognises himself in the hero, and vociferates his
approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century
was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied
delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of
feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief. The real
Princess of Hans Andersen's story, who passed a miserable night
because there was a small bean concealed beneath the twenty eider-
down beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of the
aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these ridiculous
susceptibilities. The modern sentimentalist works in a coarser
material. That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among the
emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the