Daily Arizona silver belt., 1909-03-26
THE MAN WHOLAUGHS
By the Way He Does Ii He Gives
 an Index to His Character.
THE POTENCY OF LAUGHTER.

Shown by the Effective Way In Which cervantes Smiled spsin's Vain and Foolish Chivalry Away--Men Who Never Laughed and Rarely Smiled. What an index to character Is mans laugh! What surer clcw can we have 70 both his intellect and his temper un- less 1t be that he seldom or never laughs? ''Nothing," says Goethe, Ifs more significant of mems character than what they find laughable." You know no man." says Tieck, "till you have heard him laugh-till you know when and how be will laugh" 'The perception of the ludicrous," says Elm erson, ''is a pledge of sanity. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still cOnverti- ble. If that sense is lost his fellow men can do little for him."
 Lavater, the great physiognomist, lays his great stress on the very un- equivocal and derisive nature of a laugh as an index of character. If it be free and hearty and occasion gen eral and light movement in all the features and dimple the cheek and chin, 1t is an almost infallible evil dence of the absence of any great ma terial wickedness of disposition. Cae- sar mistrusted Cassius because that leaa and hungry conspirator rarely, if ever, indulged in laughter. When Hor
 ace Walpole was in Paris in 1765 he found that laughing was out of fash ion In that gay capital Good folks" he writes, "they have no time to laugh. There are God and the king to be pulled down first, and men and wom- ell, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition" 8
 How often man fails to betray the tiger that turks within him until he laughs! Is there nothing significant in the fact recorded by Plutarch of Cato the younger that nothing could make him laugh, that his countenance was scarcely softened even by a smile? Is 1t not characteristic trait of the gloomy tyrant, Philip II. of Spain, that he rarely smiled and that he laughed but once fin his entire life. and that when he heard of the massa- ere on St Bartholomew's day? Is it not suggestive fact regarding the gloomy, taciturn Wallenstein, the ter TOT of the people, at the sight of whom as he paced through his camp with his lofty figure enveloped in a scarlet mantle and with red feather in his cap strange horror took possession of the soldiers, that he was never seen to smile? Can we wonder that the poor little dwarf, Alexander Pope, the cynical satirist, afflicted with asth- ma and dropsy. tortured with rheuma- tism, racked with headaches and threatened with cataract, should never have laughed, but only smiled?
 It has been said of the greatest of English dramatists. who united with his intense humor an equally intense, piercing insight into the darkest and most fearful depths of human nature, that no heart would have been strong enough to hold the woe of Lear and Othello except that which had the un- quenchable elasticity of Falstaff and the Midsummer Nights Dream"
 Might not similar remark besmade of that pendulum betwiyt smile and fear" Abraham Lincoln, in whom sadness and a keen sense of the comic were so strilxingly combined? How exuberant was his mirth, sparkling in jest. comic story and anecdote. and yet how often the very next moment those sad, pathetic, melancholy eyes showed a man familiar with sorrows and ac- Quainted with griefw