faces of any collection of men at church or court-house. The silent assembly thus talks very loud. The sailor carries on his face the tan of tropic suns and the record of rough weather; the old farmer testifies of stone walls, rough wood-lots, the meadows and the new barn. The doctor's head is a fragrant gallipot of virtues. The carpenter still measures feet and inches with his eye, and the licensed landlord mixes liquors in motionless pantomime. What good bargains glimmer in the merchant's aspect. And if beauty, softness and faith, in female forms, have their own influence, vices even, in slight degree, are thought to improve the expression. Malice and scorn add to beauty. You shall see eyes set too near, and limited faces, faces of the marked and invariable character. How the busy fancy inquires into their biography and relations! They pique, but must tire. Compared with universal faces, countenances of a general human type, which pique less, they look less safe. In such groups the observer does not think of heroes and sages. In the silentest meeting the eye reads the plain prose of life, timidity, caution, appetite, ignorance, old houses, musty savors, stationary, retrograde faculties pottering round (to use the country phrase) in paltry routines from January to December.
"These are the precincts of comedy and farce, and a taste for fun is all but universal in our species," etc.
Page 162, note 1. Mr. Emerson dreaded having the company captured by laughter, so likely to be unbecoming and to pass into the unseemly or uproarious. He used to quote the speech of a wise relative to her daughter or niece: "My dear, beware you don't laugh, for then you show all your faults." The "bursts of Olympian laughter" of Carlyle required all his regard for him to make them tolerable, and in the essay on Social Aims in this volume appears the shock his taste
