makes its own welcome and lev W'els all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, in which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage can plead any immunity-they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. A The Comic. PERCEPTION of the comic seems. to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It to appears be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, as pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellowmen can do little for him. The Comic. Wit No No Nature Com plete without Humour The Instinct for Play Good- A TASTE for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does the highest. The Reason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but meddles never with degrees or fractions; and it is in comparing fractions with essential integers or wholes that laughter begins. The Comic. HE perpetual game of humour is to look with considerate good-nature at every Humour object in existence, aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connec tion of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous. The Comic. |