of a trivial saying, or in forging an apposite tale; sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense, ut the affinity of their sound; sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of luminous 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 restoring an objec tion; sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech; in a tar irony; in a lusty hyperbole; in a startling metaphor; in a plausible re conciling of contradictions; or in acute nonsense. Sometimes a scenical representation of persons or things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look o gesture, passeth for it. Sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it riseth only 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 sim-, ple and plain way (such as reason teacheth and knoweth things by), which by a pretty surprising uncouthness in conceit or expression doth affect and amuse the fancy, showing in it some wonder, and breathing some delight thereto. It raiseth admiration, as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit, and reach of wit more than vulgar; it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill that he can dexterously accommodate them to a purpose before him; together with a lively briskness of humor not apt to damp those sportful flashes of imagination. Whence in Aristotle such persons are termed sideğioi, dexterous men, and corporos, men of facile and versatile manners, who can easily turn themselves to all things, or turn all things to themselves. It also procureth delight, by gratifying curiosity with its rareness or semblance of difficulty (as monsters, not for their beauty but their rarity—as juggling tricks, not for their use but their abstruseness-are beheld with pleasure); by diverting the mind from its road of serious thoughts; by instilling gaiety and airiness of spirit; by provoking to such dispositions of spirit in way of emulation or compliance; and by seasoning matter, otherwise distasteful or insipid, with an unusual and thence grateful tang."-Barrow's Works, Sermon 14

It is obvious that many of the distinctions here so acutely made are referable to the same forms of Wit, and therefore are but distinctions of mode without difference of matter. Yet so abundant, nevertheless, are the varieties which he has intimated, that had the writer followed them up with illustrations, and so have been empted to endeavor at completing the subject, one almost fancies

he might have done so. But he was truly in a state of embarras des richesses of perplexity with his abundance.

Locke followed Barrow; and was the first to discern in Barrow's particulars the face of a general proposition. He described Wit as "lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures, and agreeable visions in the fancy." (Human Understanding, book ii., chap. x.) But the necessity of fetching congruity ou of incongruity itself is here scarcely hinted at, perhaps not at all. Addison first pointed it out in his papers on Wit in the Spectator. where, in commenting on this passage of Locke, he heightens the properties pointed out by the philosopher, by adding to them the requirements of Delight and Surprise; and completes them, or at least intimates their completion, by the demand of Dissimilitude. "Every resemblance in the ideas," he observes, "is not that which we call Wit, unless it be such an one that gives Delight and Surprise to the reader"-" particularly the last ;" and "it is necessary that the ideas should not lie too near one another in the nature of things; for where the likeness is obvious, it gives no surprise."-No. 62.

Upon this hint of the great master, all the subsequent critics have spoken; such as Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, Beattie in his Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, and Hazlitt in the remarks on "Wit and Humor," prefixed to his Lectures on the English Comic Poets. The last in particular has entered into the metaphysical portion of the subject, or the inquiry into the causes of our laughter and entertainment, with so much of his usual acuteness and gusto, that I gave up, in modesty, all attempt to resume it, beyond what a different treatment might require. I resolved to confine myself to what was in some measure a new, and might at all events be not an undesirable or least satisfactory, mode of discussion: namely, as thorough an account as I could give of the principal forms both of Wit and Humor, accompanied with examples.

In order to prepare the way, however, for the readier acceptance of the definition of Wit, it may be as well to state the cause of Laughter itself, or of our readiness to be agreeably influenced by

this kind of exercise of the fancy. We are so constituted that the
mind is willingly put into any state of movement not actually pain-
ful; perhaps because we are then made potentially alive to our exist-
ence, and feel ourselves a match for the challenge. Hobbes refers
all laughter to a sense of triumph and "glory;" and upon the prin-
ciple here expressed, his opinion seems to be justifiable; though
I cannot think it entirely so on the scornful ground implied by
him.* His limitation of the cause of laughter looks like a satur-
nine self-sufficiency. There are numerous occasions, undoubt-
edly, when we laugh out of a contemptuous sense of superiority,
or at least when we think we do so. But on occasions of pure
mirth and fancy, we only feel superior to the pleasant defiance
which is given to our wit and comprehension; we triumph, not
insolently but congenially; not to any one's disadvantage, but
simply to our own joy and reassurance. The reason indeed is
partly physical as well as mental. In proportion to the vivacity
of the surprise, a check is given to the breath, different in degree,
but not in nature, from that which is occasioned by dashing
against some pleasant friend round a corner. The breath re-
cedes only to re-issue with double force; and the happy convul.
sion which it undergoes in the process is Laughter. Do I tri-
umph over my friend in the laughter? Surely not.
I only
triumph over the strange and sudden jar, which seemed to put
us for the moment in the condition of antagonists.

Now this apparent antagonism is the cause, per se, of the laughter occasioned by Wit. Our surprise is the consequence of a sudden and agreeable perception of the incongruous;-sudden, because even when we laugh at the recollection of it, we undergo, in imagination, a return of the suddenness, or the liveliness of the first impression (which is the reason why we say of a good thing that it is always "new"); and agreeable, because the jar against us is not so violent as to hinder us from recurring

"The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the folles of themselves past, when they come suddenly to rememl rance, except they bring with them any present dishonor "-Treatise on Human Na ture, chap. ix.

to that habitual idea of fitness, or adjustment, by which the shock of the surprise is made easy. It is in these reconcilements of jars, these creations and re-adjustments of disparities, that the delightful faculty of the wit and humorist is made manifest. He at once rouses our minds to action; suggests, and saves us the trouble of a difficulty; and turns the help into a compliment, by implying our participation in the process. It does not follow that everything witty or humorous excites laughter. It may be accompanied with a sense of too many other things to do so; with too much thought, with too great a perfection even, or with pathos and sorrow. All extremes meet; excess of laughter itself runs into tears, and mirth becomes heaviness. Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise. The jests of the fool in Lear are the sighs of knowledge. But as far as Wit and Humor affect us on their own accounts, or unmodified by graver considerations, laughter is their usual result and happy ratification.

The nature of Wit, therefore, has been well ascertained. It takes many forms; and the word indeed means many things, some of them very grave and important; but in the popular and prevailing sense of the term (an ascendency which it has usurp ed, by the help of fashion, over that of the Intellectual Faculty, or Perception itself), Wit may be defined to be the Arbitrary juxtaposition of Dissimilar Ideas, for some lively purpose of Assimilation or Contrast, generally of both. It is fancy in its most wilful, and strictly speaking, its least poetical state; that is to say, Wit does not contemplate its ideas for their own sakes in any light apart from their ordinary prosaical one, but solely for the purpose of producing an effect by their combination. Poetry may take up the combination and improve it, but it then divests it of its arbitrary character, and converts it into something better. Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner; the flashing of an artificial light from one object to another, disclosing some unexpected resemblance or connection. It is the detection of likeness in unlikeness, of sympathy in antipathy, or of the extreme points of antipathies them. selves, made friends by the very merriment of their introduction. The mode, or form, is comparatively of no consequence, provided it give no trouble to the apprehension; and you may bring as

many ideas together as can pleasantly assemble. But a single one is nothing. Two ideas are as necessary to Wit, as couples are to marriages; and the union is happy in proportion to the agreeableness of the offspring. So Butler, speaking of marriage itself:

-What security's too strong

To guard that gentle heart from wrong,
That to its friend is glad to pass

Itself away, and all it has,

And like an anchorite gives over

This world for the heav'n of a lover.

Hudibras, Part iii., Canto 1.

This is Wit, and something more. It becomes poetry by the feeling; but the ideas, or images, are as different as can be, and their juxtaposition as arbitrary. For what can be more unlike than a lover, who is the least solitary of mortals, or who desires to be so, and a hermit, to whom solitude is everything? and yet at the same time what can be more identical than their sacrifice of every worldly advantage for one blissful object?

This is the clue to the recognition of Wit, through whatever form it is arrived at. The two-fold impression is not in every case equally distinct. You may have to substantiate it critically; it may be discerned only on reflection; but discernible it is always. Steele in one of the papers of the Spectator, and in the character of that delightful observer, thinks that a silent man might be supposed freer than all others from liabilities to misinterpretation; "and yet," adds he, "I remember I was once taken up for a Jesuit, for no other reason but my profound taciturnity."-No. 4. There appears in this sentence, at first sight, to be nothing but what is exclusively in character with the mute and single-minded Spectator: for even the Jesuit seems to be rendered harmless by the charge of dumbness. Yet as extremes meet, and a Jesuit is always supposed to mean something different from what he pretends, a contrast of the greatest kind is first suggested between that crafty professor and our honest coun tryman, and then doubly and ludicrously impressed by a sense of the unmerited, noisy, and public danger, to which the innocent essayist was subjected in being taken before a magistrate.