least in the opinion of society. It is therefore, either in reality or appearance, a thing inconsistent. It deals in incongruities of character and circumstance, as Wit does in those of arbitrary ideas. The more the incongruities the better, provided they are all in nature; but two, at any rate, are as necessary to Humour, as the two ideas are to Wit; and the more strikingly they differ yet harmonize, the more amusing the result. Such is the melting together of the propensities to love and war in the person of exquisite Uncle Toby; of the gullible and the manly in Parson Adams; of the professional and the individual, or the accidental and the permanent, in the Canterbury Pilgrims; of the objectionable and the agreeable, the fat and the sharpwitted, in Falstaff; of honesty and knavery in Gil Blas; of pretension and non-performance in the Bullies of the dramatic poets; of folly and wisdom in Don Quixote; of shrewdness and doltishness in Sancho Panza; and it may be added, in the discordant yet harmonious co-operation of Don Quixote and his attendant, considered as a pair: for those two characters, by presenting themselves to the mind in combination, insensibly conspire to give us one compound idea of the whole abstract human being; divided indeed by its extreme contradictions of body and soul, but at the same time made one and indivisible by community of error and the necessities of companionship. Sancho is the flesh, looking after its homely needs; his master, who is also his dupe, is the spirit, starving on sentiment. Sancho himself, being a compound of sense and absurdity, thus heaps duality on duality, contradiction on contradiction; and the inimitable associates contrast and reflect one another. "The reason, Sancho," said his master, "why thou feelest that pain all down thy back, is, that the stick which gave it thee was of a length to that extent." "God's my life!" exclaimed Sancho, impatiently, "as if I could not guess that, of my own head! The question is, how am I to get rid of it?" I quote from memory; but this is the substance of one of their dialogues. This is a sample of Humour. Don Quixote is always refining upon the ideas of things, apart from their requirements. He is provokingly for the abstract and immaterial, while his squire is labouring under the concrete. The two-fold impression requisite to the effect of Humour is here seen in what Sancho's master says, contrasted with what he ought to say; and Sancho redoubles it by the very justice of his complaint; which, however reasonable, is at variance with the patient courage to be expected of the squire of a knight-errant. I have preceded my details on the subject of Wit by defining both Wit and Humour, not only on account of their tendency to coalesce, but because, though the one is to be found in perfection apart from the other, their richest effect is produced by the combination. Wit, apart from Humour, generally speaking, is but an element for professors to sport with. In combination with Humour it runs into the richest utility, and helps to humanize the world. In the specimens about to be quoted, I propose to bring the two streams gradually together, till nothing be wanting to their united fulness. It must be remembered at the same time (to drop this metaphor), that the mode, as before observed, is of no consequence, compared with what it conveys. The least form of Wit may contain a quintessence of it; the shallowest pun, or what the ignorant deem such, include the profoundest wisdom. The principal forms of Wit may perhaps be thus enumerated. 1st. The direct Simile, as just given; which is the readiest, most striking, and therefore most common and popular form. Thus Swift in his Rhapsody on Poetry; Epithets you link In gaping lines to fill a chink; Like stepping-stones, to save a stride So geographers in Afric maps Place elephants for want of towns. One of the happiest similes to be met with is in Green's poem on the Spleen. It is an allusion to the imposture practised at Naples by the exhibition of the pretended head of St. Januarius, at which a phial full of congealed blood is made to liquefy. Green applies it to the melting of Age at the sight of Beauty, and gallantly turns it into a truth. Shine but on age, you melt its snow; 2nd, The Metaphor, which is but another form of the Simile, or, as Addison has defined it, "A Simile in a Word;" that is to say, an Identification instead of Comparison. Green is remarkable for his ambitious, and, generally speaking, his successful use of this figure of speech : To cure the mind's wrong bias, Spleen, And kitten, if the humour hit, So in his picture of the sourer kind of dissenters; -a description full of wit. Nor they so pure and so precise, 3rd, What may be called the Poetical Process, the Leap to a Conclusion, or the Omission of Intermediate Particulars in order to bring the Two Ends of a Thought or Circumstance together; -as in one of Addison's papers above mentioned, where he is speaking of a whole Book of Psalms that was minutely written in the face and hair of a portrait of Charles the First; "When I was last in Oxford, I perused one of the whiskers; and was reading the other, but could not go so far in it as I would have done," &c.-Spectator, No. 58. That is to say, he perused that portion of the book which was written in one of the whiskers :---but the omission of this common-place, and the identification of the whisker itself with the thing read, strike the mind with a lively sense of truth abridged, in guise : |