presence the thorny, briary path in this work-a-day world would be uncheered. In the legend of Pandora's box, we are told that Hope was left at the bottom, as a compensation for the many ills to which poor humanity is heir, but I think the most efficient and the most ready anodyne is a sense of Humour. Hope is indeed an inspiration and often a salvation, yet the promise it offers is too often broken, while Humour presents an immediate solace,-a real and present help in time of discouragement and despondency. Let but the unhappy victim have the prehensibles by which to seize upon the proffered good, and he is assured of a temporary, if not a final reprieve. In the annals of English Court-history, we read that a crown was paid to one who had succeeded in making the king, Edward II., laugh a medicine which was doubtless more valuable and efficacious than a dozen prescriptions from the pharmacopeia. A hearty laugh is medicinal and remedial and Hippocrates believed and declared that a physician should possess a ready humour as a part of the equipment for healing, and Galen informs us that Esculapius, himself, wrote comedies and commanded them to be read to his patients for the promotion of a healthful circulation of the blood. A noted physician of Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Robert Coleman, whose success was eminent, was said to have accomplished as many cures by his wit and humour, as by the drugs he prescribed. His entrance into a sick chamber brought an atmosphere of cheerfulness, which assisted the receptivity of the patient and, to quote the homely comparison of Mother Hubbard's dog, many a friend who left a sick one with the thought that nothing

chamber

more was needed but a coffin, returned to find him laughing, and on the high way to recovery. The world is not without illustrious examples and advocates of the excellence and benefit of a hearty laugh. The emporer Titus insisted that he had lost a day, if he had passed it without laughing, and Chamfort was accustomed to tell his friends that the most utterly useless and lost of all days, was the one upon which he had not laughed,-"Il y a trois medecins qui ne se trompent pas. La gaiete, le doux exercise, et le modeste repas."

Yet there is nothing more difficult than an exact definition of humour. When Democritus was asked to give a definition of man, he answered, "It is something we see and know;" and when Dr. Johnson was asked to define poetry, he replied: "Sir, it is easier to see what it is not, we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is." And so, it may be said of humour, and an attempt to define it with explicit and logical accuracy would be much like an experiment to make a portrait of Proteus. The Protean forms of humour cannot be photographed or measured upon the Procrustean bed of analysis. The very elusiveness of humour, which is its chiefest charm, defies dissection. Who could ever square the circle of a joke, or postulate a pun?— and it is almost as difficult to establish the boundary line between wit and humour. One who spent no little time in the undertaking, H. R. Haweis, says: "I have lain awake at night, trying to define the difference between wit and humour, and there is none." Whether this be true or not, we know that the essential features are the same in each,a pretended union or juxtaposi

tion where exists customary incompatibility. That most accomplished essayist, William Hazlitt, has defined wit by a series of happy illustrations; a prism, dividing the simplicity of our ideas into motley and variegated hues; a mirror broken into pieces, each fragment of which reflects a new light from surrounding objects; or, the untwisting of the chain of our ideas, whereby each link is made to hook on more readily to others than when they were all bound together by habit; but in no comparison, perhaps, has he been more happy than when he calls wit the polypus power of the mind, by which a distinct life and meaning is imparted to different parts of a sentence or object after they are severed from each other. Yet, we know it as we know light, when we see it, and realize the effect notwithstanding our inability to formulate it. Humour prefers laugh with men, while wit laughs at them, one is the comedy of ignorance, the other of knowledge; one is of the heart, the other of the intellect; one is broad, large-hearted and kindly, while the other is too often cynical and unkind; one is apt to be indefinite, the other cold and definite.

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Α more concise and thorough definition of wit could hardly be given, than in the famous reply of Dr. Henneker to Lord Chatham, who had asked him to define it: "My lord, wit is what a pension would be, if given by your lordship to your humble servant,—a good thing well applied." Here we have the soul of wit, - the "multum in parvo," in absolute perfection, yet when we turn from Locke's cumbrous and insufficient analysis of wit to Dr. Johnson's name for it, -"a discordia concors,-a combi

nation of dissimilar images, or a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike;" or, to the words of Sydney Smith, "The pleasure arising from wit proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering things to be similar, in which we did not suspect similarity," we have an approximation, at least, to a definition of that which is so happily illustrated in Dr. Henneker's brevity. And Humour, which deals so largely with the imagination and the affections, finds. quite as much as wit, hidden analogies in the midst of differences, and if an impromptu reply is the very touchstone of wit, so humour, which is a more subtle essence, must be spontaneous. Schopenhauer speaks its most essential characteristic when he calls it the triumph of intuition over reflection, and Arnold Ruge is equally felicitous when he says it is the ideal, captive by the real. To laugh heartily we must have reality and naturalness. Surely the laughter at strained and unnatural conceits must be that mirth which Scripture describes as the crackling of thorns under a pot. Genuine humour is too delicate to endure the pressure of force, and the rule of the Gospel is very apt to be reversed, since they who seek it, are not likely to find it.

"For every touch that wooed its stay, Has brushed its richest hues away." Like the lambent light of the fire, or the play of lighting on a summer sky, wholesome and genuine humour is natural and harmless. The original meaning of the word humour is "moisture," and is not inapt, for as moisture fructifies the earth, so humour humanizes mankind.

How naturally are we attracted to the man who laughs genuinely, and laughs, too, in the right place!

His character is indexed at once: we know where to find him, the honest laugh does not emanate from the scoundrel. A man may smile and be a villain still, and may laugh grimly and sardonically, or, the loud, unsympathizing, unmeaning laugh may betray the vacant mind; but the laughter which rings with genuineness and appreciation, is the catholic note of sympathy, culture and integrity. And what a teacher is well timed wit, or genuine humour! How it punctures the bladder of conceit, pretence, and hypocrisy! But, unlike those of wit, the shafts of humour wound to heal, and heal without leaving a scar. There is nothing, says Sydney Smith, of which your pompous gentlemen are so much afraid as a little humour. How often a bloated mass of self-complacency and ignorance is reduced to insignificance by the genial rays of wholesome humour! Says an eminent English author: "I will find you twenty men who will write you systems of metaphysics over which the world shall yawn and doze and sleep, and pronounce their authors oracles of wisdom, for one who can trifle, like Shakespeare, and teach the truest philosophy when he seems to trifle most."

Yet, the gift of wit is too often a dangerous possession. As the diamond is worn for display, wit, which like that precious stone, cuts as well as shines, is unhappily too much employed for the satisfaction and vanity of its possessor, rather than for the benefit of others, and the professional wit is as much despised as dreaded. What can be more boresome than the man who is always trying to be funny! Nor is it the try, try again which ultimately achieves success. Humour,

like happiness, often flees from her pursuer, and in the mouths of these indefatigable aspirants, we are sometimes tempted to think it has length, breadth and thickness! But what is more delightful than the spontaneity and elusiveness of genuine humour; and we are not surprised that Cicero and Quintilian in their instructions upon Oratory, insisted upon a true understanding of humour as essential to the perfection of the actor and the orator.

That the spirit and essence of humour thrived in the mercurial atmosphere of Greece, we have abundant proof. In fact, a Court of Humour was held periodically at Heracleum, a village near Athens, which consisted of sixty members, and their sayings and doings were current among the people, bearing always the stamp of the "sixty" in order to prove their genuineness. It would be interesting to know if the acts and sayings of that Court gave origin to the common parlance of today—“behaving like sixty!" At any rate, Philip of Macedon esteemed their jokes so highly that he asked for a written copy of them.. The Greeks undoubtedly perpetrated a masterly practical joke in the taking of Troy, and Homer represents Olympus as resounding with laughter, on more than one occasion, and the gods themselves were not superior to practical jokes, as, for instance, when they seduced, by promise of fair weather, poor mortals to venture upon a picnic, and when enjoyment was at its height, sent a sudden shower of rain upon them, at the same time laughing uproariously at the ridiculous plight of the merrymakers. Douglass Jerrold says that the golden chain of Jove was nothing but a succession of laughs,-a chromatic scale of

merriment, reaching from earth to Olympus. No less an authority than Socrates insisted that a tragic poet should be a comic poet also. We commonly picture Plato and Aristotle as solemn personages, of dignified mien, clad in stately robes, whereas they laughed with their friends like other men and lived simple, cheerful lives. We know that Plato sent to Dionysius of Syracuse, that work of Aristophanes entitled "The Clouds," as an answer to the tyrant's question if Athens was given to humour. Yet the Athenian law forbade a judge of the Areopagus to write a comedy, which enactment was probably meant to invest the office with a severity of dignity which would prevent contempt of court!

Thersites made the Greek heroes the subjects of the broadest and most robust jokes, and Diogenes, who was called "Socrates gone mad," was not destitute of humour when he replied to the man who asked him what kind of wine he liked best, "Another man's," and to one who inquired of him the proper hour for dining, "If you are rich, when you will; if you are poor, when you can."

The humour of Alcibrades was so proverbial in Athens, that sometimes. it became what humour and the quality of mercy ought not to be, somewhat strained; and the flogging he gave the pedagogue because the latter was without a copy of Homer at hand, savored more of bravado than of genuine humour.

Cicero's joke that the more Greek a man knew the greater knave he would prove, is well known, and the element of satire which distinctly prevades Horatian wit has furnished precedent for many a satirist of later generations. Scipio

Africanus was a good natured humorist, and a strong, pronounced vein of humour ran through the whole Caesar family. Indeed, the sententious alliteration uttered by Julius Caesar, veni, vidi. vici, was claimed by his friends to have been spoken in jest, which seems altogether credible. Imagine the stalwart, grotesque egotism of a man who could make that speech in earnest! Such self-inflation smacks rather of twentieth century bombast than of the age in which Caesar lived! Besides, we must remember that Caesar was not from the Middle-West of the United States! The reply of Augustus to the abject flatterers who informed him that they had erected an altar to him, proves that a sense of humour was common to the Caesar family: "I thank you: how often you must have kindled a fire on that altar! I saw a tree growing on it!"

General biography offers ample testimony to the fact that a sense of humour is a feature of great minds; hence Locke's argument that wit and humour are not ordinarily accompanied with judgment well deserves the stigma put upon it by Sterne, who says that ever since its pronouncement it has been made the Magna Charta of stupidity. On the contrary, it would seem that among the greatest minds, the sense of humour never faileth. And why should it not be so? Since humour is the result of an unexpected fitness or incongruity observed either in the world without or in association of ideas within, acting upon a mind qualified to appreciate this fitness or incongruity, it is to be expected. that keen and powerful intellects should not be wanting in this qualification. That great powers of acquisition and absorption can and do

mour:

The word wit is of Saxon origin and was formerly applied to sense. or intellect, and even in our time

we

are accustomed to speak of natural or inherited mentality as mother-wit, thus furnishing additional argument that wit in its present signification is not necessarily dissociated from judgment, and like that gift which Burns so heartily commends, enables us to see ourselves as others see us, thereby rescuing us from many a blunder and folly. How often an author, lacking a sense of humour, becomes not only insipid but absorbed. Paradise Lost, sublime as it is, might have been saved from the absurdity of representing the great hierarchy of heaven as strategists and tacticians, conducting a campaign upon the principles and methods of European warfare, had its author possessed a keen appreciation of humour. The novelist who is without this valuable sense may startle us with impossible situations, encyclopaedic knowledge and cumbrous masses of erudition, but he will never present a faithful picture of life and will never stir the hearts of his readers, to whatever degree he may awaken or stimulate curiosity.

And as humour inhabits the strongest intellects of all, so too it belongs to minds of finest quality. The great masters of pathos have

"There's not a string attuned to mirth, But has its cord in melancholy." and we know that one, greater than Hood, that unparagoned mastermind in tragedy and comedy, and in the sublimest poetry of all time, dealt with the pathetic and the humourous as no author has done before or since; and the more we study his production the more we realize that no brain could have created Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, and no heart could have held the woe of King Lear and the sorrow of Ophelia, but the brain and heart which had the unquenchable elasticity of Falstaff and Midsummer Night's Dream and the humour which portrayed Polonius and Malvolio.

It was a wise and just admonition of Lord Chesterfield that a man should live as much within his wit as within his income, and he who exceeds the propriety and boundary of wit, reveals his weakness as much as his fault. And who is not impressed with the wholesomeness and genuineness of Shakespeare's wit! Never does he transgress the bounds of propriety or justice, and although he lived in an age when the Church and her offices seemed to invite the shafts of wit and ridicule, he speaks of her priests and her ministrations with profoundest reverence, and of womanhood with the utmost respect. The famous Thomas Fuller, who was himself a great wit and noted for his pointed and pithy sayings, was horrified at the man who dared "to jest with the two-edged sword of God's word," and staunch old Dr. Johnson characterized such a mode of merriment, as that which a good man dreads for its profaneness and a witty man disclaims for its easiness and vulgarity.