and laughter of a respite during pleasure from death. The strongest instances of effectual and harrowing imagination, are in the story of Amine and her three sisters, whom she led by her side as a leash of hounds, and of the goul who nibbled grains of rice for her dinner, and preyed on human carcasses. In this condemnation of the serious parts of the Arabian Nights, I have nearly all the world, and in particular the author of the Ancient Mariner, against me, who must be allowed to be a judge of such matters, and who said, with a subtlety of philosophical conjecture which he alone possesses, 'That if I did not like them, it was because I did not dream.' On the other hand, I have Bishop Atterbury on my side, who, in a letter to Pope, fairly confesses that he could not read them in his old age.'

There is another source of comic humour which has been but little touched on or attended to by the critics-not the infliction of casual pain, but the pursuit of uncertain pleasure and idle gallantry. Half. the business and gaiety of comedy turns upon this. Most of the adventures, difficulties, demurs, hair-breadth 'scapes, disguises, deceptions, blunders, disappointments, successes, excuses, all the dextrous manœuvres, artful inuendos, assignations, billets-doux, double entendres, sly allusions, and elegant flattery, have an eye to this to the obtaining of those favours secret, sweet, and precious,' in which love and pleasure consist, and which when attained, and the equivoque is at an end, the curtain drops, and the play is over. All the attractions of a subject that can only be glanced at indirectly, that is a sort of forbidden ground to the imagination, except under severe restrictions, which are constantly broken through; all the resources it supplies for intrigue and invention; the bashfulness of the clownish lover, his looks of alarm and petrified astonishment; the foppish affectation and easy confidence of the happy man; the dress, the airs, the languor, the scorn, and indifference of the fine lady; the bustle, pertness, loquaciousness, and tricks of the chambermaid; the impudence, lies, and roguery of the valet; the match-making and unmaking; the wisdom of the wise; the sayings of the witty, the folly of the fool; 'the soldier's, scholar's, courtier's eye, tongue, sword, the glass of fashion and the mould of form,' have all a view to this. It is the closet in Blue-Beard. It is the life and soul of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar's plays. It is the salt of comedy, without which it would be worthless and insipid. It makes Horner decent, and Millamant divine. It is the jest between Tattle and Miss Prue. It is the bait with which Olivia, in the Plain Dealer, plays with honest Manly. It lurks at the bottom of the catechism which Archer teaches Cherry, and which she learns by heart. It gives the finishing grace to Mrs. Amlet's confession-Though I'm old, I'm chaste."

Valentine and his Angelica would be nothing without it; Miss Peggy would not be worth a gallant; and Slender's 'sweet Ann Page would be no more! 'The age of comedy would be gone, and the glory of our play-houses extinguished for ever." Our old comedies would be invaluable, were it only for this, that they keep alive this sentiment, which still survives in all its fluttering grace and breathless palpitations on the stage.

Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shewn in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation, and character: wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view.Wit, as distinguished from poetry, is the imagination or fancy inverted, and so applied to given objects, as to make the little look less, the mean more light and worthless; or to divert our admiration or wean our affections from that which is lofty and impressive, instead of producing a more intense admiration and exalted passion, as poetry does. Wit may sometimes, indeed, be shewn in compliments as well as satire; as in the common epigram— 'Accept a miracle, instead of wit:

See two dull lines with Stanhope's pencil writ.'

But then the mode of paying it is playful and ironical, and contradicts itself in the very act of making its own performance an humble foil to another's. Wit hovers round the borders of the light and trifling, whether in matters of pleasure or pain; for as soon as it describes the serious seriously, it ceases to be wit, and passes into a different form. Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference, or an ingenious and striking exposition of those evanescent and glancing impressions of objects which affect us more from surprise or contrast to the train of our ordinary and literal preconceptions, than from anything in the objects themselves exciting our necessary sympathy or lasting hatred. The favourite employment of wit is to add littleness to littleness, and heap contempt on insignificance by all the arts of petty and incessant warfare; or if it ever affects to aggrandise, and use the language of hyperbole, it is only to betray into derision by a fatal comparison, as in the mock-heroic; or if it treats of serious passion, it must do it so as to lower the tone of intense and high-wrought sentiment, by the introduction of burlesque and familiar circumstances. To give an

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instance or two. Butler, in his Hudibras, compares the change of night into day, to the change of colour in a boiled lobster.

"The sun had long since, in the lap
Of Thetis, taken out his nap;
And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn
From black to red, began to turn:

When Hudibras, whom thoughts and aching
'Twixt sleeping kept all night, and waking,
Began to rub his drowsy eyes,

And from his couch prepared to rise,

Resolving to dispatch the deed

He vow'd to do with trusty speed.'

Compare this with the following stanzas in Spenser, treating of the same subject:

'By this the Northern Waggoner had set

His seven-fold team behind the stedfast star,
That was in Ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fix'd and sendeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wand'ring are:
And cheerful chanticleer with his note shrill,
Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery car
In haste was climbing up the eastern hill,
Full envious that night so long his room did fill.

At last the golden oriental gate

Of greatest heaven 'gan to open fair,

And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,

Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair,

And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy air:
Which when the wakeful elf perceiv'd, straitway

He started up and did himself prepare

In sun-bright arms and battailous array,

For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.'

In this last passage, every image is brought forward that can give effect to our natural impression of the beauty, the splendour, and solemn grandeur of the rising sun; pleasure and power wait on every line and word: whereas, in the other, the only memorable thing is a grotesque and ludicrous illustration of the alteration which takes place from darkness to gorgeous light, and that brought from the lowest instance, and with associations that can only disturb and perplex the imagination in its conception of the real object it describes. There cannot be a more witty, and at the same time degrading comparison,

than that in the same author, of the Bear turning round the pole-star to a bear tied to a stake:

'But now a sport more formidable
Had raked together village rabble;
'Twas an old way of recreating
Which learned butchers call bear-baiting,
A bold adventurous exercise
With ancient heroes in high prize,
For authors do affirm it came
From Isthmian or Nemæan game;
Others derive it from the Bear
That's fixed in Northern hemisphere,
And round about his pole does make
A circle like a bear at stake,

That at the chain's end wheels about
And overturns the rabble rout.'

I need not multiply examples of this sort.-Wit or ludicrous invention produces its effect oftenest by comparison, but not always. It frequently effects its purposes by unexpected and subtle distinctions. For instance, in the first kind, Mr. Sheridan's description of Mr. Addington's administration as the fag-end of Mr. Pitt's, who had remained so long on the treasury bench that, like Nicias in the fable, 'he left the sitting part of the man behind him,' is as fine an example of metaphorical wit as any on record. The same idea seems, however, to have been included in the old well-known nickname of the Rump Parliament. Almost as happy an instance of the other kind of wit, which consists in sudden retorts, in turns upon an idea, and diverting the train of your adversary's argument abruptly and adroitly into another channel, may be seen in the sarcastic reply of Porson, who hearing some one observe that certain modern poets would be read and admired when Homer and Virgil were forgotten,' made answer-And not till then!' Sir Robert Walpole's definition of the gratitude of place-expectants, That it is a lively sense of future favours,' is no doubt wit, but it does not consist in the finding out any coincidence or likeness, but in suddenly transposing the order of time in the common account of this feeling, so as to make the professions of those who pretend to it correspond more with their practice. It is filling up a blank in the human heart with a word that explains its hollowness at once. Voltaire's saying, in answer to a stranger who was observing how tall his trees grew That they had nothing else to do'-was a quaint mixture of wit and humour, making it out as if they really led a lazy, laborious life; but there was here neither allusion or metaphor. Again, that master-stroke in Hudibras is

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sterling wit and profound satire, where speaking of certain religious hypocrites he says, that they

'Compound for sins they are inclin❜d to,

By damning those they have no mind to;'

but the wit consists in the truth of the character, and in the happy exposure of the ludicrous contradiction between the pretext and the practice; between their lenity towards their own vices, and their severity to those of others. The same principle of nice distinction must be allowed to prevail in those lines of the same author, where he is professing to expound the dreams of judicial astrology.

'There's but the twinkling of a star
Betwixt a man of peace and war,
A thief and justice, fool and knave,
A huffing officer and a slave;
A crafty lawyer and pickpocket;
A great philosopher and a blockhead;
A formal preacher and a player;

A learn'd physician and man slayer.'

The finest piece of wit I know of, is in the lines of Pope on the Lord
Mayor's show-

'Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more.'

This is certainly as mortifying an inversion of the idea of poetical immortality as could be thought of; it fixes the maximum of littleness and insignificance: but it is not by likeness to any thing else that it does this, but by literally taking the lowest possible duration of ephemeral reputation, marking it (as with a slider) on the scale of endless renown, and giving a rival credit for it as his loftiest praise. In a word, the shrewd separation or disentangling of ideas that seem the same, or where the secret contradiction is not sufficiently suspected, and is of a ludicrous and whimsical nature, is wit just as much as the bringing together those that appear at first sight totally different. There is then no sufficient ground for admitting Mr. Locke's celebrated definition of wit, which he makes to consist in the finding out striking and unexpected resemblances in things so as to make pleasant pictures in the fancy, while judgment and reason, according to him, lie the clean contrary way, in separating and nicely distinguishing those wherein the smallest difference is to be found.1

1 His words are-If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand consists quickness of parts, in this of having them unconfused, and being able nicely to