"An evil soul producing Holy Writ Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the core." The case is similar with the beautiful or the sublime. We could select hundreds of passages from authors which contain all that is required to make them witty, and yet are not so because they are something more. one in reading the following thinks of their wittiness: No "It does not follow," he says, "that everything witty or humorous excites laughter. "A-well-a-day!-do what we can for It may be accompanied with a sense of too him,' said Trim, maintaining his pointmany things to do so: with too much thought: "the poor soul will die. He shall not die with too great a perfection even, or with pa--by God!' cried my Uncle Toby. The acthos or sorrow. cusing spirit which flew up to Heaven's Chanwith the oath blushed as he gave it in cery We doubt very much whether the beauty of the comparisons in Suckling's "Bride " does not remove it from the category of witty compositions : "Her feet beneath her petticoat Now we entirely dissent from this: wit-and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, and humor, which convey the same kind of dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it pleasure to the understanding, are perfect-out forever." dy incompatible with serious or important thoughts, and are swallowed up by nobler passions or deeper emotions. The sentiments which arise from the contemplation of the useful, the beautiful, or the sublime are inîmical to the feeling of wit, as real indignation and compassion are to that of humor. The first effect produced upon a person unacquainted with mechanics by the examination of a complicated machine, may, it is not impossible, be near akin to that produced by a witticism; but after the first flush has passed away, and the utility of the relations of its various parts is seen, mere astonishment gives place to a state of rational approbation. So also when a useful truth is inculcated, the mind passes over the merely surprising rela- Or tion of the ideas involved, and fixes itself upon the justness of the precept. We find this As if they feared the light. "Her lips were red, and one was thin, Butler's allusion to neglected loyalty,- with many of our popular proverbs, with ap- The oft-quoted Hindt epigram is another inophthegms, like that of La Rochefoucauld, Hypocrisy is the homage which Vice pays to stance : "The good man goes not upon enmity, but rewards with kindness the very being who in Or with lines such as those of Robert jures bim; so the sandal-wood tree, whilst it is felling, imparts to the edge of the axe its aromatic flavor.' "" manner. nurse, and the window-shutters being thrown | address, even every pertinent address, to conopen, the bright morning rays burst in upon tempt, is not humorous. This passion is not the scene of the night's merriment. Hook's the less capable of being excited by the severe and tragic than by the merry and comic tone was changed, and he concluded his song with the address to the child,— "See the sun, now the heavens adorning, Diffusing health, wisdom, and light; To you, 'tis the promise of morning, To us, 'tis the parting good-night."" Or again the sublime verses of Campbell,"For dark and despairing my sight I may seal, But man cannot cover what God would reveal; 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their shadows before." Surprising incongruities also occasionally produce effects very different from humorous. Few readers of Don Quixote" have failed in the end to cease to laugh at, and to experience genuine sympathy with one who, in all bis madness, was so perfect a gentleman. Poor and pompous Major Bath, in Fielding's novel of" Amelia," excites, we are assured, more compassion than derision when he is swearing "by the honor and dignity of a and cooking gruel in a saucepan man sick sister. for a A bodkin is a much less destructive weapon than a spear, but that does not make it an agreeable instrument with which to be prodded; so, although serious invective may inflict deeper wounds, it is never agreeable to be derided, even with the utmost bonhomie. There is a vast difference between Gifford's Epistle to Peter Pindar" and Byron's "Dedication" of his "Vision of Judgment' to the poet laureate; but neither showed, we are inclined to think, "much warm, tender fellow-feeling" to the person addressed. Dr. Southey was probably as little pleased with the address," Bob Southey, you're a poet,' as Dr. Walcott was at being called "a bloated mass, a gross, blood-boltered clod; though the one is funny and the other is savage, and neither true. Sheridan's description of the East India Company, in his invective against Warren Hastings, would be humorous if it did not express too strong a sentiment of contempt: "To return again to our friend dressed in green, whom we left in the mud; suppose, "There was something in the frame and instead of a common, innocent tumble, he had constitution of the Company which extended experienced a very severe fall, and we discov- the sordid principles of their origin over all ered that he had broken a limb, our laughter is immediately extinguished and converted into a lively feeling of compassion. The incongruity is precisely as great as it was before, but as it has excited another feeling not compatible with the ridiculous, all mixture of the humorous is at an end."* Circumstances which commence by being ludicrous may thus frequently end by being pathetic; and the two feelings, opposed though they be, may run so gradually one into the other, or may change so instantaneously, as to lead the observer to confound them together. It is this, perhaps, which has induced Mr. Carlyle to aseert, in his essay on "Jean Paul Richter," that "the essence of humor is sensibility, warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence." There is, no doubt, a certain good-natured banter which comes under the head of humor; but there is much humor that is by no means kind. "The passion which humor addresseth as its object," says Dr. Campbell," is contempt; but it ought carefully to be noted that every "Sketches of Moral Philosophy," p. 138. their successive operations, connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest achievements, the meanness of a pedler and the profligacy of pirates. Alike in the political and the military line could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals; and thus we saw a revolution brought ecuting an arrest; a town besieged on a note about by affidavits; an army employed in exof hand; a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was that they exbibited a government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre and the little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding a truncheon in one hand and picking a pocket with-the other." So would Swift's verses on the Irish Parliament: "As I stroll the city oft I See a building large and lofty; Placed against the church direct, "Philosophy of Rhetoric," vol. i. p. 52. Dr. Johnson called his depeditation. "Did I ever say anything about your head?" Reynolds, the dramatist, observing to Morton the thinness of the house at one of his plays, and so on in a strain now quite unfit for pub-added, he supposed it was owing to the war. lication. Indeed, we have constantly to rc"No," replied Morton, "I should judge it gret, in selecting our illustrations, either the owing to the piece." A very plain young coarseness of our ancestors or the fastidious-man, of loose habits, happening to remark ness of the present age. Hitherto we have pursued Lord Bacon's precept delivered in his reading on the "Statute of Uses," "The nature of a use is best discovered by considering first what it is not and then what it is, for it is the nature of all human science and knowledge to proceed most safely by negative and exclusion to what is affirmative and inclusive.". We come now to the positive portion of our work; we will test some instances of pure wit and humor by our rule, and we think it will be found that their force arises from surprise, and surprise alone. In "Tristram Shandy," after the Curse of Ernulfus has been read by Dr. Slop, we find it said, Mr. Phillips, in his "Life of Curran," mentions that upon one occasion he met a noble lord who had greatly promoted the Union. The latter said of the house of the ci-devant Irish Parliament, near to which they were, "Curran, what do they intend to do with that uscless building?-for my part I hate the sight of it."-"I do not wonder at that, my lord," returned Curran, contemptuously; "I never yet heard of a murderer who was not afraid of a ghost." Macaulay records the mot with which Halifax soothed the apprehensions of a statesman who had become a Catholic at the accession of James II., and yet thought he had in another matter offended the king. "Be of good cheer, my lord; thy Rowland Hill said Ad before Douglas Jerrold that he was fastidious, You mean," growled the latter, "that you are fast and hideous." once to some people who had come into his chapel to avoid the rain, "Many people are to be blamed for making religion a cloak; but I do not think those much better who make it an umbrella." "That officer," Louis XIV. exclaimed, within hearing of one of his generals who frequently solicited favors, is the most troublesome in my service.' Your majesty's enemies," he replied, "have said the same thing more than once." dison makes an undertaker, in one of his plays, thus upbraid a "mute" who had laughed at a funeral. You rascal, you, have been raising your wages for these two years past, on condition that you should appear more sorrowful; and the higher wages you receive the happier you look." great Prince de Condé was told that his enemies called him a deformity. "How do they know that?" he said; "they have never seen my back." We have also the modest remonstrance of the lover to his inamorata,― When late I attempted your pity to move, Why were you so deaf to my prayers? Perhaps you were right to dissemble your love; But why did you kick me down-stairs?" I The Rousseau maintained that the real founder of civil society was the man who first enclosed a piece of ground, said, "This is mine," and found people fools enough to believe him. Theodore Hook being challenged to pun upon the name of Rosenagen, introduced the following stanza into one of his improvisations, "Yet more of my muse is required, ters to his Son" is another illustration,— The epigram on "Lord Chesterfield's Let "Vile Stanhope! demons blush to tell, In twice two hundred places "But little did the ungenerous lad Concern himself about them; He sneaked to hell without them." : The Irish Chief Baron Bushe made this impromptu verse upon two agitators who had refused challenges to fight a duel, the one on account of his affection for his wife, the other on account of his love for his daughter, "Two heroes of Erin, abhorrent of slaughter, We have taken these examples at random, without any reference to the fact which we wish to establish, but we think there is not a single case in which it is not illustrated. In each we find either an occult relation of ideas or an incongruity fitted to excite merely surprise in our minds upon its discovery. In Leigh Hunt's "Illustrative Essay on Wit and Humor," their manifestations are distributed into fourteen different divisions. It is not our intention to follow him into all these categorical vagaries. We shall confine ourselves to some few of the more ordinary forms which Wit or Humor assumes, and leave it to the curious reader himself to investigate the other classes at his leisure. The simile, or metaphor, affords the greatest facilities for bringing remote ideas into juxtaposition for the purposes of lively contrast. We have a whole string of such in Swift's Rhapsody on Poetry," in which he says of poetasters' epithets. They are,-— "Like stepping-stones, to save a stride In streets where kennels are too wide; Or like a heel-piece, to support A cripple with one foot too short; Or like a bridge that joins a marish To moorland of a different parish." And he continues,— "So geographers in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps; Place elephants for want of towns." Praed has filled his "Lay of the Brazen "I think that friars and their hoods, I think while bigots storm and frown, Or in the "Belle of the Ball,”- And mortgages, and great relations, Oh, what are they to love's sensations! As Baron Rothschild for the Muses." "I think that love is like a play Where tears and smiles are blended, Whose shine with shower is ended; Sydney Smith's classical allusions to Lord Jeffrey, mounted on a donkey, may be add ed, length, and subjoining an immeasurable mass ace to "Killing no Murder" (as quoted by of notes, which appear to concern every Sydney Smith),learned thing, every learned man, and almost every unlearned man, since the beginning of the world." The plan of leaving out intermediate ideas in order to bring the two ends of a thought or circumstance together is also a means of producing a witty or humorous effect. Horace Walpole called a young dandy who was always grinning, "the gentleman with the silly teeth," and Addison has made much use of it in his Spectators: for instance, those on "Fans" and "Patches." I "There is scarce any emotion in the mind which does not produce a suitable agitation in the face insomuch that if I only see the face of a disciplined lady, I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes. have seen a face so very angry that it would have been dangerous for the absent lover who provoked it to have come within the wind of it; and at other times so very languishing, that I have been glad, for the lady's sake, the lover was at a sufficient distance from it." At the opera one evening, he says,— "To your highness justly belongs the honor of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it. It is then only, my lord, the titles you now usurp will be truly yours. You will then be indeed the deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his. You will then be that true reformer which you would now be thought; religion shall then be restored, liberty asserted, and parliaments have those privileges they have sought will have place besides those of the sword, We shall then hope that other laws and that justice shall be otherwise defined than the will and pleasure of the strongest ; and we shall then hope men will keep oaths again, and not have the necessity of being and be like their ruler. All this we hope false and perfidious to preserve themselves from your highness's happy expiration, who are the true father of your country; for while you live we can call nothing ours, and it is from your death that we hope for our inheritances." for. Upon inquiry, I found that the body of Amazons on my right hand were Whigs, Or the celebrated remarks of Gibbon in the and those on my left Tories; and that those fifteenth chapter of the "Decline and Fall: who had placed themselves in the middle boxes were a neutral party, whose faces had "The scanty and suspicious materials of not yet declared themselves. I must here ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to take notice, that Rosalinda, a famous Whig dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the partisan, has most unfortunately a very beau-first age of the Church. The great law of tiful mole on the Tory part of her forehead; which being very conspicuous, has occasioned many mistakes, and given an handle to her enemies to misrepresent her face as though it had revolted from the Whig interest." The omission in these extracts of the commonplaces which would explain that the face and fan were but the instruments for the expression of opinion, and their identification with the motive power, strikes the mind with a lively sense of truth abridged under the guise of fiction and impossibility. But irony, sarcasm, and burlesque parody are the figures which produce perhaps the greatest effect. The discovery of the relation existing between the real blame and the apparent praise; of the oblique invective, established not directly, but by inference and analogy, and of the incongruity between the borrowed thoughts and the theme to which they are applied, excite the feeling of surprise in the mind to the highest degree. Take the following sentences from the pref impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the Gospel, and to a careless observer their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect, not only by whom but likewise to whom the Divine Revelation was given. The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed. upon the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. But Porson's criticism upon Gibbon himself, in the preface to the " Letters to Travis," is no less excellent in its way, "His industry is indefagitable; his accuracy scrupulous; his reading, which indeed is sometimes ostentatiously displayed, immense; his attention always awake; his |