gnities, taking on himself the
disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty
to the carcass, the shadow, the shell, and empty husk of Lear?

In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression
which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with
us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh,
which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the
first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed
incongruous characters at the _Harlot's Funeral_, on a superficial
inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the
first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or
the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful
assemblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or
pity in their perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of
duty to the relics of their departed partner in folly, but I am as
much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should
be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by
real mourners, pious children, weeping friends,--perhaps more by the
very contrast. What reflections does it not awake, of the dreadful
heartless state in which the creature (a female too) must have lived,
who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch
who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a
face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or
womanhood--the hypocrite parson and his demure partner--all the
fiendish group--to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more
affecting than if the poor friendless carcass had been depicted as
thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies,
itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet.

It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this
picture,--incongruous objects being of the very essence of
laughter,--but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from
that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and
grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight
of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with filial
fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to
fleece and plunder,--we smile at the exquisite irony of the
passage,--but if we are not led on by such passages to some more
salutary feeling than laughter, we ar