FUN AS A MEDICINE.

ONE of the proverbs in the Book of Proverbs says that " a merry heart doeth good like a medicine," and it might safely be said that it very often does a great deal more. We appear to be coining back to the same opinion by way of reaction from the grave and sententious moralities cf o it great-grandmothers. A very clever little book of rhymes a ,c1 pictures professes to be "The Bad Child's Book of Beasts," * and comes nearer to Lear's wonderful nonsense pictures and verses than anything we have seen since, though it is not quite so gleefully extravagant, and the humour is of a

rather different kind. But the idea of the book is evidently that a "so-called" bad child needs nothing but a little fun to- make him " unnaturally good,"—which means, take it, that

the bad child and the good child are deviations from the happy mean to much the same extent, and that the bad child needs laughing into the happy mean as much as the good child needs laughing out of that severe and priggish modera- tion which used to be held up to the earlier generations of this century as a model for their imitation in such books as "Sandford and Merton." The anonymous author of "The Bad Child's Book of Beasts" professes,- " The moral of this priceless work, If rightly understood,

Will make you—from a little Turk Unnaturally good."

That is, it will take the bad child through the other extreme before it brings him to the juste milieu. And we infer that the unnaturally good child will need to undergo a similar- discipline to make him aware of " the falsehood of extremes " by betraying him into the wild and wayward demeanour which

seems to find its climax in the supreme vice of never brushing his hair :—

" Do not as evil children do

Who on the slightest grounds Will imitate the Kangaroo With wild unmeaning bounds.

Who take their manners from the Ape Their habits from the Bear, Indulge the loud unseemly jape, And never brush their hair."

The bad child, therefore, is made to appreciate carefully those habits and manners in the world of beasts which are

hardly fit for juvenile imitation or aspiration. The kangaroo- is too violent; the lion is too formidable and grim, and also too fashionable with his "very small waist;" the tiger is too subtle with his carefully disguised preference for diminishing the populousness of large families ; the whale is too clumsy and gives too much blubber, as well as causes too much matter for reflection to every boy who does not aspire to be a don ; the camel is too rough in his paces; the hippopotamus is too thick-skinned since his hide flattens leaden bullets, and since he sets an example of indifference to the attacks of opponents; the dodo is too antiquated,—nay, obsolete,—and can only be studied in museums; the learned fish is too stupid, and has not enough of the practical in his composition to know that he should go into the water when it rains ; the camelopard is too aspiring and strikes

his bead against the stars, which places him beyond our- humble sphere ; the elephant has so ostentatious a trunk and so curtailed a tail, that both his significance and his in- significance are altogether alien to ours; the big baboon goes about with nothing on,—" a shocking thing to do,"—but

with a little attention to dress he would be a mere replica of the average man, and therefore a lesson to us, both by his differences from, and his proximity to, ourselves ; the rhinoceros, which "has a horn where other beasts have not," and (the poet might have added) exalts it ostentatiously, should be a lesson to us by the ugliness that pride in prominent features produces ; and the frog, though "justly sensitive" to the contemptuous epithets of man, will at least help us not to be so willing to apply contemptuous epithets to others of our fellow-creatures :-

" No animal will more repay

A treatment kind and fair ; At least so lonely people say Who keep a frog (and, by the way, They are extremely rare).

The only beast which comes in for any warm praise is the yak, which is set up as an example of benignant docility to

• Oxford: Alden and Co. London : Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.

the wild little boys who " will not brush their hair." The yak is tame, the yak is laborious, the yak will allow itself to be led about by a string, which is not true of any wild little boy, and the yak has a placid face and long silky hair. What could be a better companion for a mischievous little boy than this Harry Sandford among the beasts P Surely, too, the yak might be made a warning to the good little boy of what he may come to if he is too tame and teachable, as Harry Sand- ford has long been a warning to the children of the Edge- worthian regime. We see no reason at all why "The Bad Child's Book of Beasts " should not be " The Good Child's Book of Beasts " too. Only the bright example for the bad child should be the serious warning for the good child against being too tame and too amenable. A gain, the pictures, with their delightful air of mild caricature, are at least as good as the rhymes. They are not like Lear's dashing and reckless indications of a laughing heart, but are half way between those wilful impossibilities,—that screaming, almost mad, caricature,—and ordinary gaieties of heart. Indeed, they stand in about the same relation to Lear's pictures of animals in which Charles Keene's delightful representations of cockneys and rustics stand to Cruikahank's inimitable heroes, dwarfs, giants, witches, and elves. They are mockeries of the actual world, while Lear's are happy imaginations of an im- possible world. They will bring laughter from the so-called bad (or mischievous) boy and the so-called good or slightly priggish boy alike, and not only at the deficiencies of the boy whom each of them piques himself on excelling, but also at the deficiencies of his own comrades in daring or didacticism. Not only will the wanton boy who tries to mock the kangaroo's " unmeaning bounds " feel the absurdity of such efforts, but the little prig who congratulates himself on being "dainty as the cat, and as the owl discreet," will feel that his display of discretion is a very absurd and inferior kind of pretension.

When the writer of the Book of Proverbs, or the writer of the special proverb which he placed in his selection, spoke of a merry heart doing good like a medicine, he probably thought of the emancipation which such a heart gains from the misery of being self-occupied, the power it gains of looking out on the world with a lightness of spirit all its own. And that is, indeed, the sense in which fun may be said to be the best of all medicines. To learn to laugh at the foibles of others is harmless and even useful enough if you do not laugh at them ill-naturedly, but to learn to laugh at your own is a close approximation to wisdom, if you laugh at them with true insight into the ridiculous side of those foibles. Of course, fun is no medicine for the graver sins and moral dis- tortions of human life, for these are no subjects for laughter, but rather for tears. But there are many imperfections for which light-hearted mockery is a far more effectual medicine than any kind of moral scorn or reproof. You cannot learn how foolish it is to play with edged tools half as well from being worried to think it wrong, as you can from being shown that it is in the highest degree ridiculous. And you cannot learn that it is absurd and pedantic to believe in your own wisdom in any way half so effective as you can from catching yourself oat as it were in that affectation of superior discretion which only gives you the air of blinking and solemn empti- ness that the owl embodies in the rolling of his darkness- loving eyes. Books of nonsense are the best , cures in the world for that laughter of fools which is like the crackling of thorns under a pot, and for that Ohilaish 'assump- tion of virtue and sagacity which so completely faIls in con- cealing the vanity from which it proceeds. To endow the heart with a good reserve of innocent fun is one of the surest of preservatives against real evil. The child, or indeed the man, who can laugh heartily and without bitterness,—bitter laughter is not the laughter of the heart,—is very soon aware of the approach of any condition of mind which involves feelings inconsistent with that hearty laughter ; and is put on his guard by the sense of self-reproach with which those lighter moods affect him, and make him feel that he has no right to them. That, we suspect, is the deeper sense in which "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." But besides this, good fun certainly purges the spirit of all those foibles which are very often the cloaks of insincerity. The child who imagines himself spirited because he delights in pro- voking the creatures beneath him and in playing practical jokes

on the companions around him, is better cured of his delusion by being shown hew silly he looks to those who see through him, than by any other method. And the child who is full of the self-importance of knowing rather more, and learning rather more rapidly, than his schoolfellows, is far more easily laughed out of his conceit than he could ever be argued out of it. Good fun is a remedy for foibles, and at least a danger-signal against deeper evil. The child or man who feels that good fun has a reproach and a sting for him, is well aware that he has wandered from the straight way.