that the mind is willingly put into any state of movement not actually painful; perhaps because we are then made potentially alive to our existence, and feel ourselves a match for the challenge. Hobbes refers all laughter to a sense of triumph and "glory;" and upon the principle 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 saturnine self-sufficiency. There are numerous occasions, undoubtedly, 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

*

"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 follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonour."-Treatise on Human Nature, chap. ix.

recedes, only to re-issue with double force; and the happy convulsion which it undergoes in the process is Laughter. Do I triumph 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 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; ex

cess of laughter itself runs into tears, and mirth becomes heaviness. Mirth itself is too often but me- ; lancholy in disguise. Thę jests of the fool in Lear are the sighs of knowledge. But as far as Wit and Humour 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 ascendancy which it has usurped, 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 themselves, 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 it

self:

-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 every thing? 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 im

pression 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 singleminded 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 countryman, 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.

The case, I think, is the same with Humour. Humour, considered as the object treated of by the humorous writer, and not as the power of treating it, derives its name from the prevailing quality of moisture in the bodily temperament; and is a tendency of the mind to run in particular directions of thought or feeling more amusing than accountable; at