He miss'd the pathway, he forgot the hours;
And when he look'd upon his watch again,
He found how much old Time had been a winner-
He also found that he had lost his dinner.

Canto i., st. 94.

Epigrammatic Wit may be held to belong to this form; though in general it announces itself by its title and brevity, and thus substitutes expectation for surprise ;—a higher principle in great things, but not in small. Here follows, however, an epigram of a very startling kind. It is a remonstrance addressed to a lady :

When late I attempted your passion to prove,

Why were you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love;
But why did you kick me down stairs?

This kind of surprise, in its preceding form, is connected with another species of irony, the Mock-heroic in general, or Raillery in the shape of Poetic Elevation.

This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourished two locks.

Rape of the Lock, Canto 2.

Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.

Happy the man, who void of care and strife,
In silken or in leathern purse retains
A splendid shilling.

Ibid., Canto 3.

Philips.

Drayton, in his Nymphidia, or Court of Faery, has an amusing description of a rider, who turns and winds a fiery "earwig." The best mock-heroical epigram I am acquainted with is one to a similar purpose on an ant. I quote from memory :—

High mounted on an ant, Nanus the tall
Dared its whole fire, and got a dreadful fall.
Under th' unruly beast's proud feet he lies,
All torn; but yet with generous ardor cries,
"Behold me, gods! and thou, base world, laugh on,
For thus I fall, and thus fell Phaëton.

But this species of wit is too well known to need dwelling upon. It may be useful, however, to observe, by way of caution against the mistakes of such students in poetry as think "classicality" everything, and who write a great deal of mock-heroic without knowing it, that one of its secrets consists in an application of old metaphors, inversions, and other conventional and ancient forms of speech to modern languages. Much wit in prose is enhanced by a scholarly acquaintance with Greek and Latin etymology, and a corresponding use of words in their primitive and thoroughly applicable senses-an accomplishment turned to special account by Sydney Smith. But take away inversions, the metaphorical habit, and other Virgilianisms from conventional poetry, and you destroy two-thirds of the serious verses of the last century. They are sometimes admirably used, for purposes of banter, by wits who are guilty of the very fault when they become grave. Thus Peter Pindar, who is as dull in his serious

poetry as he is laughable in his comic :

Once at our house, amidst our Attic feasts,

We likened our acquaintances to beasts;

(It is Boswell, speaking of Johnson.)

As, for example, some to calves and hogs,
And some to bears and monkeys, cats and dogs,
We said (which charm'd the Doctor much, no doubt)
His mind was like or elephants the snout ;

That could pick pins up, yet possess'd the vigor
For trimming well the jacket of a tiger.

Bozzy and Piozzy.

And Dr. King, on the perils of brown-paper plasters attendant upon athletic exercises :—

He that of feeble nerves and joints complains,
From nine-pins, coits, and from trap-ball abstains;
Cudgels avoids, and shuns the wrestling-place,
Lest vinegar resound his loud disgrace.

Art of Cookery.

"Vinegar resounding " is very ridiculous; but not more so than the use of the same classical metaphor on a thousand occa

sions, where the presence of Fame's trumpet or the ancient lyre is out of the question.

But the most agreeable form of irony, especially when carried to any length, is that which betrays the absurdity it treats of (or what it considers such) by an air of bonhomie and good faith, as if the thing ridiculed were simplest matter of course, and not at all exposed by the pretensions with which it is artfully set on a level. It is that of Marot and La Fontaine; of Pulci, Berni, and Voltaire. In the elder of these Italians, and in the two oldest of the Frenchmen, it is best assumed, as far as regards simplicity; but in Berni and Voltaire it is most laughable, because by a certain excess and caricature of indifference it gives its cue to the reader, and so makes him a party to the joke, as rich comic actors do with their audiences. Such is Voltaire's exquisite banter on War, in which he says, that a monarch picks up a parcel of men "who have nothing to do, dresses them in coarse blue cloth at two shillings a yard, binds their hats with coarse white worsted, turns them to the right and left, and marches away with them to GLORY."—Dictionnaire Philosophique, Art. Guerre.

Thus also, speaking of the Song of Solomon (to the poetry of which, and the oriental warrant of its imagery, he was too much a Frenchman of that age to be alive, notwithstanding his genius), he says of it, that it is not in the style of the Greeks and Romans; but then he adds, as if in its defence, that Solomon was Jew ;" and "a Jew is not obliged to write like Virgil." ("Un Juif n'est pas obligé d'écrire comme Virgile."—Id., Art. Salomon.)

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It is impossible to help laughing at this, however uncritical. Very lucky was it for the interest and varieties of poetry, that the East was not obliged to write like the West; and much less to copy a copyist? Voltaire was a better Christian than he took himself for, and the greatest wit that ever lived; but Solomon had more poetry in his little finger-at least, of the imaginative sort-than the Frenchman in his whole mocking body.

5th Burlesque, or Pure Mockery, from burlare, Ital., to jest with, to jeer. The word, I take it, comes from the same imitative root as burrasca and burberia (storm and swelling), and

originates in the puffing and blowing of the cheeks of the old comedians. This is the caricature and contradiction of the serious in pretension, as the mock-heroic is the echo and the misapplication of the dignified in style. It farcically degrades, as the other playfully elevates; and is a formidable exhibition, when genius is the performer. Aristophanes, by means of it, confounded Socrates with the Sophists, and prepared the way for his murder. Its greatest type in the English language is Hudibras, which reversed the process of Aristophanes, and rescued good sense and piety out of the coarse hands of the Puritans. Plentiful specimens of it from that poem will be found in the present volume. The work of Rabelais is a wild but profound burlesque of some of the worst abuses in government and religion, and has had a corresponding effect on the feelings, or unconscious reasonings, of the world. This must be its excuse for a coarseness which was perhaps its greatest recommendation in the "good old times," though at present one is astonished how people could bear it. Rabelais' combination of work and play, of merriment and study, of excessive animal spirits with prodigious learning, would be a perpetual marvel, if we did not reflect that nothing is more likely to make a man happy, particularly a Frenchman, than his being able to indulge his genius, and cultivate the task he is fit for. Native vivacity and suitable occupation conspire to make his existence perfect. Voltaire is a later instance. Thus there can be no doubt that the mirth of Rabelais was as real as it seems. Indeed it could not otherwise have been so incessant. It is a pity somebody does not take up the wonderful translation of him by Urquhart, and make a good single volume of it, fit for modern readers. It would include all the best points, and even what Barrow would have called its most "acute nonsense,”—jargon, which sometimes is the only perfect exhibition of the nonsense it ridicules. Such, for instance, is the gibberish so zealously poured forth by the counsel for plaintiff and defendant in the court of law (Book the Second), and the no less solemn summing up, in the same language, by the learned judge. A little correction would soon render that passage admissible into good company. What, too, could be more easily retained in like manner, than the account of the gi

gantic despot Gargantua, who "ate six pilgrims in a salad ?" of the Abbey of the Thelemites, or people who did as they pleased (natural successors of the prohibited)? of the reason "why monks love to be in kitchens?" of the Popemania and the decretals? of the storm at sea, and how Panurge would have given anything to have been out of it on dry land, even to the permission to somebody to kick him? Admirable things have the wits and even the gravest reformers (the wits themselves are sometimes the gravest) got out of this prince of buffoons, whom the older I grow (always excepting the detestable coarseness taught him by the monks) the more I admire; for I now think that his Oracle of the bottle meant the sincerity which is to be found in wine, and that his despair of "extracting water out of pumice-stones," and of "washing asses' heads without losing his soap" pointed only at things that ought to be impossible, and not at those hopes for the world which his own heartiness tended to animate. Steele, Swift, Sterne, nay the Puritans themselves, as far as they were men of business, got wisdom out of Rabelais; and so perhaps has the noble Society of his modern countrymen, whose motto is, Help yourself, and Heaven will help you." “Put your trust in God," said the Cromwellite, "and keep your powder dry.” "Pantagruel," says Rabelais, "having first implored the assistance of Heaven, held fast, by the pilot's advice, of the mast of the ship" (book iv., chap. 19).

"We must implore, invoke, pray, beseech and supplicate Heaven,” quoth Epistemon ; "but we mustn't stop there; we must, as holy writ says, cooperate with it."

"Devil take me," said Friar John, "but the close of Seville would all have been gathered, vintaged, gleaned, and swallowed up, if Ihad only sung From the snares of the enemy,' like the rest of the scoundrelly monks; and hadn't bestirred myself to save the vineyard as I did."

Friar John had stripped himself to his waistcoat to help the seamen. Epistemon, Ponocrates, and the rest did as much. Panurge alone sat on the deck, weeping and howling. "Odzooks!" cried Friar John: "What! Panurge playing the calf! Panurge whining! Panurge braying! Would it not become thee much better to lend us a helping hand, than to keep sitting there like a baboon and lowing like a cow?" Be, be, be, bous, bous, bous," returned Panurge (he was blubbering and swallowing the water that broke over them);-"Friar John, my friend, my good father,

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