238 IS KNOWLEDGE HYPOTHETICAL?IDIOSYNCRASY.

rather than that they should exhibit such a spectacle of stupidity and perversion.

IS KNOWLEDGE HYPOTHETICAL ?

If you choose to call all knowledge hypothetical, because first principles are arbitrarily assumed, you certainly may call it so, if you please; but then I only contend that it does quite as well as if it were not hypothetical, because all the various errors agree perfectly well together, and produce that happiness which is the end of knowledge.

IDIOSYNCRASY.

Ir is a very wise rule in the conduct of the understanding, to acquire early a correct notion of your own peculiar [constitution of mind, and to become well acquainted, as a physician would say, with your idiosyncrasy. Are you an acute man, and see sharply for small distances? or are you a comprehensive man, and able to take in wide and extensive views into your mind? Does your mind turn its ideas into wit? or are you apt to take a common-sense view of the objects presented to you? Have you an exuberant imagination, or a correct judgment? Are you quick, or slow? accurate, or hasty? a great reader, or a great thinker? It is a prodigious point gained if any man can find out where his powers lie, and what are his deficiencies,if he can contrive to ascertain what Nature intended him for.

SQUARE PERSONS AND ROUND HOLES.

IF you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, some circular,

THE LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE.

239

some triangular, some square, some oblong, and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly, that we can say they were almost made for each other.

THE LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE.

I SOLEMNLY declare that, but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher, as preferable to that of the greatest and richest man here present: for the fire of our minds is like the fire which the Persians burn in the mountains,-it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed, upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions. Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love co-eval with life, what do I say, but love innocence, - love virtue, - love purity of conduct, love that which, if you are rich and great, will sanctify the blind fortune which has made you so, and make men call it justice, love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes,-love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you, - which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the outer world, that which will make your motives habitually great and honourable, and light up in an instant a

240

RELATIONS SUGGESTED BY WIT.

thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud! Therefore, if any young man here have embarked his life in pursuit of knowledge, let him go on without doubting or fearing the event;-let him not be intimidated by the cheerless beginnings of knowledge, by the darkness, from which she springs, by the difficulties which hover around her, by the wretched habitations in which she dwells, by the want and sorrow which sometimes journey in her train; but let him ever follow her as the Angel that guards him, and as the Genius of his life. She will bring him out at last into the light of day, and exhibit him to the world comprehensive in acquirements, fertile in resources, rich in imagination, strong in reasoning, prudent and powerful above his fellows, in all the relations and in all the offices of life.

RELATIONS SUGGESTED BY WIT.

THE first limit to be affixt to that observation of relations, which produces the feeling of wit, is, that they must be relations which excite surprise. If you tell me that all men must die, I am very little struck with what you say, because it is not an assertion very remarkable for its novelty; but if you were to say that man was like a time-glass, that both must run out, and both render up their dust, I should listen to you with more attention, because I should feel something like surprise at the sudden relation you had struck out between two such apparently dissimilar ideas as a man and a time-glass.

SENSATIONS OF WIT.

THERE is a mode of teaching children geography by disjointed parts of a wooden map, which they fit together. I have no doubt that the child, in finding the kingdom

ELABORATION OF WIT.-PUNS.

241

or republic which fits into a great hole in the wooden sea, feels exactly the sensation of wit. Every one must remember that fitting the inviting projection of Crim Tartary into the Black Sea was one of the greatest delights of their childhood; and almost all children are sure to scream with pleasure at the discovery.

THE CAUSE OF WIT, NOT ITS ESSENCE, DEFINABLE.

I AM only defining the causes of a certain feeling in the mind called wit;-I can no more define the feeling itself, than I can define the flavour of venison. We all

seem to partake of one and the other, with a very great degree of satisfaction; but why each feeling is what it is, and nothing else, I am sure I cannot pretend to determine.

ELABORATION OF WIT.

It is imagined that wit is a sort of inexplicable visitation, that it comes and goes with the rapidity of lightning, and that it is quite as unattainable as beauty or just proportion. I am so much of a contrary way of thinking, that I am convinced a man might sit down as systematically, and as successfully, to the study of wit, as he might to the study of mathematics: and I would answer for it, that, by giving up only six hours a day to being witty he should come on prodigiously before midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know him again.

PUNS.

little to say about puns;

they are in very The wit of lan

I HAVE very bad repute, and so they ought to be.

guage is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas, that it

R

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CHECK ON WITS.-VULGAR DISPLAY.

is very deservedly driven out of good company. Sometimes, indeed, a pun makes its appearance which seems for a moment to redeem its species; but we must not be deceived by them: it is a radically bad race of wit.

BANISHMENT OF PUNSTERS.

ONE invaluable blessing produced by the banishment of punning, is an immediate reduction of the number of wits.

CHECK ON WITS.

THE condition of putting together ideas in order to be witty operates much in the same salutary manner as the condition of finding rhymes in poetry;-it reduces the number of performers to those who have vigour enough to overcome incipient difficulties, and makes a sort of provision that that which need not be done at all, should be done well whenever it is done. For we may observe, that mankind are always more fastidious about that which is pleasing, than they are about that which is useful.

VULGAR DISPLAY.

Ir a man have ordinary chairs and tables, no one notices it; but if he stick vulgar gaudy pictures on his walls, which he need not have at all, every one laughs at him for his folly.

TRUE SARCASM.

appears,

A TRUE sarcasm is like a sword-stick - -it at first sight, to be much more innocent than it really is, till, all of a sudden, there leaps something out of it- sharp, and deadly, and incisive-which makes you tremble and recoil.