ough he
was always anxious to do so, and to recollect humorous stories, of which
he was exceedingly fond. As instances, I recollect once when we were
staying at Mr Wells's, at Redleaf, one morning at breakfast a very small
puppy was running about under the table. 'Dear me,' said a lady, 'how
this creature teases me!' I took it up and put it into my breast-pocket.
Mr Wells said, 'That is a pretty nosegay.'--'Yes,' said I, 'it is a
dog-rose.' Wilkie's attention, sitting opposite, was called to his
friend's pun, but all in vain. He could not be persuaded to see anything
in it. I recollect trying once to explain to him, with the same want of
success, Hogarth's joke in putting the sign of the woman without a head
('The Good Woman') under the window from which the quarrelsome wife is
throwing the dinner into the street."

ULYSSES AND HIS DOG.

Richard Payne Knight, in his "Inquiry into the Principles of
Taste,"[111] when treating of the "sublime and pathetic," quotes the
story of Ulysses and his dog, as follows:--"No Dutch painter ever
exhibited an image less imposing, or less calculated to inspire awe and
terror, or any other of Burke's symptoms or sources of the sublime
(unless, indeed, it be a stink), than the celebrated dog of Ulysses
lying upon a dunghill, covered with vermin and in the agonies of death;
yet, when in such circumstances, on hearing the voice of his old master,
who had been absent twenty years, he pricks his ears, wags his tail, and
expires, what heart is not at once melted, elevated, and expanded with
all those glowing feelings which Longinus has so well described as the
genuine effects of the true sublime? That master, too--the patient,
crafty, and obdurate Ulysses, who encounters every danger and bears
every calamity with a constancy unshaken, a spirit undepressed, and a
temper unruffled--when he sees this faithful old servant perishing in
want, misery, and neglect, yet still remembering his long-lost
benefactor, and collecting the last effort of expiring nature to give a
sign of joy and gratulation at his return, hides his face and wipes away
the tear! This is true sublimity of character, which is always mixed
with tenderness--mere sanguinary ferocity being terrible and odious, but
never sublime. [Greek: Agathoi polydakrytoi andres]--_Men prone to tears
are brave_, says the proverbial Greek hemistich; for courage, which does
not arise from mere coarseness of organisation, but from that sense of
dig