are the themes of wit and humour. There is another order of minds, narrower in its range of observation, and less reflective on its own being, which, dwelling within the covert of some hypothesis of its own, shapes the world to its own standard, and neither sees nor feels the incongruities of humanity. Such is not genius-but a dry, hard, and mechanical sort of intellect, and wit and humour are all mystery to it.

The authors who deal most largely with human nature are those in whom the elements of wit and humour will be most displayed-in connection, however, with serious elements. This will be seen especially in those writers whose imaginations have produced the greatest number of creations-I mean of invented characters-representative of humanity. In English literature, the three who may, I think, be regarded as pre-eminent for the number and life-like reality of their creations, are Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Scott; and in their writings may be found the finest specimens of genuine humour, coupled, too, with tragic power equally admirable. It is remarkable, too, to observe how, in an early age, the large imagination of Chaucer blended with the tenderest pathos a humour coarse at times, but again as delicate as any of an age of refinement-such as his description of the "Sergeant of the Law," which is like a smile of kindly-natured humour, rather than a stroke or a sneer of satire:

Nowhere so busy a man as he there n'as,
And yet he seemed busier than he was

Examples without number of Sir Walter Scott's genial humour, as dis-
played in the personages of his novels, will rise up to the thoughts of
any one.
How beautifully is it interwoven with the serious passages in
the Antiquary! How it gleams through the clouds of civil war and the
gloom of Puritan severity in Old Mortality! and what a fine relief does
it not give to the deeper tragedy of the Bride of Lammermoor! In
Shakspeare, the whole subject might be studied and illustrated through
a boundless variety of character, from the malevolent and wicked wit
of Iago, with its serpent-like venom, the inexhaustible resources of
Falstaff, the morbid humour of Jacques, or the healthy humour of Fal-
conbridge, and the many other phases of these faculties in his men and

women.

These powers may be discovered also in other great poets of our language, the subjects or forms of whose poems were less favourable to

their appearance. The pensive atmosphere with which the sage and solemn spirit of Spenser has enveloped the region of his Faery Land, admits, at times, some rays of a quaint humour. In Milton, the powers assume so stern an aspect, that one hesitates in associating them with wit and humour, and yet, assuredly, such are the faculties, in their most repulsive shape, both in his prose writings and his poems, betraying how a grand and noble spirit was embittered by the adverse circumstances of both public and private life. It was eminently characteristic for him to speak of "anger and laughter," as "those two most rational faculties of human intellect," and to boast of that "vein of laughing," which “hath oft-times a strong and sinewy face in teaching and conforting.”

The presence of these faculties in the greatest English prose writers is also susceptible of proof. In the most illustrious of the old divines, they appear in a way that is not permitted to later theologians—I refer not only to such instances as the works of the church historian, Thomas Fuller, or the sermons of "the witty Dr. South," but also to the humour which is blended with the reasonings of Barrow and the poetic eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. The wit of Swift is universally recognised as his most effective weapon: and in another masculine mind, also distempered by disease as Swift's was, there was a sort of rough humour, in Dr. Johnson's. The high-toned eloquence of Burke, though far from sparkling with wit like Sheridan's, was not without its humour: observe it, too, in his chief political treatise the quiet humour for example, in the well-known comparison of the noisy, factious pamphleteers with solid unloquacious English sobriety: "Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chirp, while thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour."

66

It is to one of the great divines of the seventeenth century that we owe the most famous description (it attempts not definition) of Wit: I refer, of course, to that passage so often, and yet never too often, quoted in Barrow's sermon against foolish talking and jesting." It was composed at a time when the word "Wit" was beginning to change its original meaning of mental power for the more limited sense of later times, and when the faculty itself, having the special favour of the "merry monarch" was in unwonted, and, it may be added, wanton activity. Dr. Barrow said, "To the question what the thing we speak

of is, or what this facetiousness doth import? I might reply as Democritus did to him that asked the definition of a man, 'Tis that which we all see and know: any one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance than I can inform him by description. It is, indeed, a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of a fleeting air. Sometimes it lieth in a pat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in forging ar apposite tale: sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense or the affinity of their sound · sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of humourous expression: sometimes it lurketh under an odd similitude: sometimes it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or cleverly retorting an objection: sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense: sometimes a scenical representation of persons of things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth for it sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous boldness, giveth it being; sometimes it riseth from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty wresting obvious matter to the purpose; often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language. It is, in short, a manner of speaking out of the simple and plain way, (such as reasoning teacheth and proveth things by), which, by a pretty surprising uncouthness in conceit or expression, doth affect and amuse the fancy, stirring it to some wonder and breeding some delight thereto."

One cannot read this large induction and analytical description of the forms of wit, from the higher inventions down to "acute nonsense," without thinking how thoughtfully this great and learned divine must have observed the wits of the times of Charles the Second, and how genially he must have received what he so wisely expounded! Nor can I discover that the metaphysicians have been able to advance beyond this description to the more precise ground of definition. The most acute of the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, gave what is at best a negative definition of the laughable, when he said it depended on what is out of its proper time and place, yet without danger or pain. That remarkable but wrong-headed English philosopher, Hobbes, who thought that war

was man's natural state, defined laughter to be" a sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with infirmity of others or our own infirmity." The definitions given by Locke and by the Scotch rhetoricians, and the analysis made by Coleridge and by Sydney Smith, have done little more than trace the effect of wit or humour to an agreeable surprise occasioned by an unusual connection of thoughts. Still more difficult would it be to trace the subtle relations between wit and humour, and to analyze that higher form in which both are combined, but for which language helps us with Wit may, I think, be regarded as a purely intellectual process, while humour is a sense of the ridiculous controlled by feeling, and coexistent often with the gentlest and deepest pathos, visible, it may be, even in those smiles which have been finely described, as 66 a sad heart's sunshine."

no name.

Often the simple sense of incongruity produces the effect of the laughable—the unfitness of the means to the end, as in some of Dr. Johnson's definitions, where his Latinized dialect makes him like the interpreter in Sheridan's farce, the harder to be understood of the twohis definition of "Network-any thing reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections," or when, in the preface to his Dictionary, in explanation of the difficulty of ranging the meanings of a word in order, he asks: "When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their nature collateral?" Again, when Johnson defines "Excise," to be "a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged, not by common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid:" and Pension, to be "an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state-hireling for treason to his country”— a comic effect is produced by the unexpected encounter with such a fervid temper among the dispassionate definitions of a dictionary, almost as if one should meet with a spiteful demonstration in geometry. To an ear accustomed to simple English, simple in the choice and in the arrangement of the words, the highly Latinized and stately sentences of Dr. Johnson now make an impression bordering sometimes on the ludicrous— owing, I think, to the unnatural disparity between his style and the ordinary colloquial use of language: this was curiously shown by a practical joke that was practised on that worthy and simple-mannered man, the late Sir David Wilkie, by a fellow-painter and his brother, and described in the Memoir of Collins, the landscape painter: "Mr. Collins's brother Francis possessed a remarkably retentive memory, which

he was accustomed to use for the amusement of himself and others in the following manner. He learnt by heart a whole number of one of Dr. Johnson's Ramblers,' and used to occasion considerable diversion to those in the secret, by repeating it all through to a new company, in a conversational tone, as if it was the accidental product of his own fancy, now addressing his flow of moral eloquence to one astonished auditor, and now to another. One day, when the two brothers were dining at Wilkie's, it was determined to try the experiment upon their host. After dinner, accordingly, Mr. Collins paved the way for the coming speech, by leading the conversation imperceptibly to the subject of the paper in the 'Rambler.' At the right moment, Francis Collins began. As the first grand Johnsonian sentences struck upon his ear (uttered, it should be remembered, in the most elaborately careless and conversational manner), Wilkie started at the high tone that the conversation had suddenly assumed, and looked vainly for explanation to his friend Collins, who, on his part, sat with his eyes respectfully fixed on his brother, all wrapt attention to the eloquence that was dropping from his lips. Once or twice, with perfect mimicry of the conversational character he had assumed, Francis Collins hesitated, stammered, and paused, as if collecting his thronging ideas. At one or two of these intervals, Wilkie endeavoured to speak, to ask a moment for consideration; but the torrent of his guest's eloquence was not to be delayed until at last it reached its destined close; and then Wilkie, who, as host, thought it his duty to break silence by the first compliment, exclaimed, with the most perfect unconsciousness of the trick that had been played him, ‘Ay, ay, Mr. Francis ; verra clever—(though I did not understand it all)—verra clever!""

It not unfrequently happens, also, that a sense of the ludicrous in style may be traced in a false and florid rhetoric to the incongruous combination of literal and figurative forms of expression. Reading the Earl of Ellesmere's agreeable and usually well-written History of the Two Sieges of Vienna, I noted this sentence: speaking of Sobieski, he says, "inspired by the memory of former victories, . . . he flung his powerful frame into the saddle, and his great soul into the cause.' "This is that juxtaposition of the literal and metaphorical, which is best exemplified by a well-known instance in a panegyric on the celebrated Robert Boyle, in which he was described as "father of chemistry, and brother of the Earl of Cork." Again, another form of the literary ludicrous, is in the incongruous combination of metaphors produced by the want of discipline in speech, increased, perhaps, by an excess of unguided fancy. Lord Castlereagh's parliamentary speeches are said to