E are met with a merry company at our elbows, and are bent upon putting Sorrow to shame. In this room shall be none but the gay and the glorious; God send the others to the pit! Thought pulls at his brows, Care weeps like a jade: let the unhandsome couple go match out of doors, out of sight, out of hearing. There is no favour we would require of Fortune but to commend us to the jocund, to withhold us from the sad. This sober melancholy is no divine contrivance but a manufacture of the Devil, wherewith he would have us mock our human composition. We make no terms with Sorrow at our board; he turns in a rout at our menace, and we fall to scoffing at his flight. Time has not seen this craven in our midst since man issued his primeval challenge. Whatever changes pass before us we have ever the trick of laughter. Without, though the street roar with noises or be silent with dread, silence nor uproar may trouble us here: our merriment is secure, our joy is immutable, we measure out delights with the measure of our lives. There be none here but have grinned through the feast since Time first set them at the board; grief is a breath that fleets ere the features take note of it, a cough, an itch, a blink that hath no place in time. Despair has no home here; from the roar and of this revelry trouble slinks away. To assume a melancholy visage were the surest discomfiture, for our clean wits fall upon it, white-hot, ere the expression be set; and the heavy lines turn for sheer shame into a gamesome smile. Nay, there is none here but the roysterer, the free of heart, the quick of head, the heedless, the all-merry. To be wise, we say, is to be the fool of circumstance; let the mind run only upon the latest chuckle of your neighbour. A dull dog, we say, is a rebuke unto his Maker. He hath bequeathed you a monstrously well-meaning gift, sirs; pray guard Him from the knowledge of His failures. Is there an error in the type? As you are gentlemen, pardon this faulty architecture. Two dispositions has He given you: the one unto mirth, the other unto morals. Are you mad that you halt between them? Life is to us all here a swift pageant of delights; one ensueth upon the other, grin upon grin, jape upon jape, laughter upon laughter, content upon contentment, continuously rounding infinitely to the end. Yet our feast hath no end, as it hath no beginning; for they that were are no longer; and when we shall be not, others shall have our places. Against this solid defiance Death is but a poor antagonist, this vain browbeater, this uncomely visitant. He hath grown mad at his figures, and hath the thought, poor zany, to lap up the eternal.