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cause annoyance without serious injury. To burn assafoetida in a room is considered a good practical joke. The pain is acute but temporary, and free from bad consequences.

The pleasure of causing or witnessing degradation extends to the established governnient, religion, and the sanctities and decencies of life. Hence vilification and profanation of the solemn and sacred rites of society may become causes of ludicrous pleasure. As, however, the respecters of law and religion are offended by such liberties, they are chiefly taken with creeds and ritual that are losing their hold of mankind; as in Lucian's severe ridicule of the pagan gods.

3. The Ludicrous or Humour, as a form of literary composition, must work on the same lines, and take up the same occasions, as in the actual; but with the advantage of an unlimited scope in imagining conjunctions suited to the effect; while the essence of the art lies in the mollifying ingredients that appease the sympathies without marring the delight.

The means to this end are various :

(1) As already implied, the Ludicrous in the form of Humour fastens on the slighter forms of giving pain. There is in consequence an unavoidable diminution of malignant pleasure; this, however, may be more than made up in the abeyance of sympathy, which permits the full swing of such enjoyment as the occasion supplies.

(2) In ludicrous degradation, we may aim at points of character that persons do not pride themselves upon, or else upon what cannot be seriously assailed.

We may laugh at the slovenliness in dress of one that is indifferent to appearance.

Macaulay shows his good humour in quoting a description of himself from Blackwood- A little, splay-footed, ugly dumpling of a fellow,' and then remarking-Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so enamoured of his beauty as I am'.

Likewise, it is mere innocent raillery to pretend that a millionaire cannot afford indulgence and hospitality. The force of the jest would lie in an innuendo of stinginess.

(3) To make a person utter jests at his own expense is the most humorous of any. This dispenses with all sympathy, through the voluntary self-surrender of the party himself. This is the humour of the fools of Comedy.

To constitute a genial and good-humoured company, it

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is essential that each, in his turn, should submit to be laughed at.

Sydney Smith's remark to the Chapter of St. Paul's, on the proposal to lay a wooden pavement round the building,if we lay our heads together, the thing is done,'--was witty and humorous. If any one outside had said,—' if you lay your heads together,'-it would have wanted the humour. Thackeray's Snobs of England' is said to be by one of themselves. At the time when the theories of the origin of language were hotly debated in the Philological Society, one of the members remarked, Every one of us thinks all the rest mad'; the view taken, at Shakespeare's dictation, of the English generally, by the gravedigger in Hamlet.

(4) The degradation may be made the occasion of a compliment. A man is often raised into importance by being publicly caricatured. It is possible to pass off, by the seasoning of a little jocularity, an amount of adulation that would otherwise make the object of it uncomfortable. (For examples, see WIT.)

(5) One great softening application is the mixture of tender and kindly feeling with the ludicrous effect. This is a recognized distinction between humourists in the best sense, as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Addison, Burns, Scott, Richter, and those that have little or no redeeming tenderness, as Swift, Pope, and Voltaire. Hence, the frequent remark that the same writer excels at once in pathos and in humour. There is humour in Froissart's saying 'The Saxons take their pleasures sadly, after their fashion'. This brings out a touch of pity to temper the somewhat ridiculous picture.

(6) High poetic originality or beauty is accepted as redeeming the severity of derisive laughter. This is the one great justification of Aristophanes. Whence it is, that malignity, in every form,-whether vituperation, ridicule or humour-is rendered tolerable and acceptable by the genius of style, when nothing else would quiet our compunctions of pity for the victim. We shall have to advert more fully to the connexion with Wit, which has importance enough to be treated apart.

(7) The ludicrous may be the accompaniment of disquisitions on matters of knowledge or instruction, as in the political articles of Sydney Smith.

(8) There remains a large sphere of unchecked malignant

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gratification. Much of the enjoyment of mankind arises from victimizing, in idea, the absent, the dead, and the imaginary. Doubtless the satisfaction would be still greater to see the sufferers writhing under the infliction: but this has its drawbacks, in consequence of our possessing a tender and sympathetic as well as a malevolent side. We accept a smaller pleasure that is free from compunctions, in preference to a greater that carries a sting with it.

Historical literature and fiction have multiplied, and are still multiplying, comic pictures without end. Every new instance possessing the attributes essential to the Emotional Qualities in general, and to the quality of Humour in particular, is an addition to our pleasures. At the same time, there is a growing stringency in the negative conditions of the comic art, especially as regards vituperation and ridicule. Not only must our sympathies with actual persons be taken into account; even the ideal indulgence in malignity and horror is considered as unduly strengthening what is already too strong by nature.

(9) Strange to say, the malignant sentiment can find satisfaction in venting itself upon the inanimate world. The young girl can make her doll the victim of her displeasure, as well as the recipient of her loving caresses; and is equally gratified in both ways. Savages, disappointed in the chase or the fight, find consolation in maltreating the images of their gods, no less than by uncomplimentary language.

Hudibras finds an occasion for the ludicrous in the

morning dawn. The device consists in a degrading or vulgarizing simile :--

The sun had long since, in the lap
Of Thetis, taken out his nap,

And, like a lobster boiled, the morn
From black to red began to turn.

At the time when the sun was treated as a person, a great comic genius, like Aristophanes or Lucian, could put his rising into a ludicrous form, but our present notions of the fact resist such attempts.

Likewise

For he, by geometric scale,

Could take the size of pots of ale.

People have a kind of respect for geometry, no doubt, and anything that is respected may be humorously degraded, but the application to pots of ale does not sufficiently hurt

the feelings of the most susceptible geometer; as a jest it tells only against Hudibras himself.

Passing now to the classification of the literary embodiments of the present quality, we find a number of designations connected with language. The Figures of Speech named Epigram,' 'Irony,' 'Innuendo,' and 'Hyperbole,' are more or less pressed into the service of the Comic art. Exaggeration, even to the pitch of extravagance and absurdity, is freely employed for the need of provoking laughter; nevertheless, without some measure of originality or genius, it cannot attain the dignity of literary art.

Much stress is laid by some writers on the Anti-climax, or the falling down from a high to a low degree of Dignity or Strength. By the very nature of the case, this is a species of humiliation or degradation, and fits in exactly with the general bearing of the Ludicrous, of which it is merely one exemplification. It may take the form of immense expenditure for small result, as in the line of Horace

Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

4. Conspicuous among the express designations of the Ludicrous are-Parody, Mock-heroic, and Burlesque.

Common to all these is the conjunction, through language, of the dignified, lofty, serious, estimable, with the mean, vulgar, indecorous, indecent, filthy.

Parody, like caricature generally, is the mimicking of grand and serious composition in a vulgar or inferior subject. It was one of the many ways that Aristophanes derided the great tragedians. Of modern examples, among the best known are Philips's parody of Milton's style, and the Rejected Addresses, which caricatured a whole generation of authors. The humour is greatly assisted by the closeness of the imitation.

Mimicry is a noted source of pleasure, of the purely malevolent stamp. Something is due to the skill of the imitation, but the chief part of the effect is the humiliation of the object by a mixture of degrading touches. The mere fact that a person can be imitated by another seems to prove smallness or poverty of character, implying a certain degree of inferiority. The mimicry of parrots is ludicrous for

the same reason.

Savages can be intensely tickled by the successful mimicry of their chiefs.

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Not far removed from the same effect is the Mock-heroic; which is also the treating of mean or degrading things in the style of high composition, without imitating any author in particular. The Burlesque has no specific difference of meaning; being interchangeable at pleasure with the two other designations.

Among the frequent accompaniments of the Laughable, whether as Humour or as Wit, have to be counted Oddity, Incongruity and Irrelevance. These are sometimes treated as the ultimate explanation of the quality, and as not depending for their efficacy on malevolent pleasure.

Oddity is, from its nature, calculated to excite attention and surprise, as being a deviation from the accustomed routine of things. The surprise may be agreeable or it may be the opposite; everything depends on the mode and the circumstances. The whimsical gargoyles on the old cathedrals are agreeable or not according to the success of the working out. As degrading caricatures of humanity, they give the pleasure of malevolence; but they may also fail even in this, from feeble execution.

There are

Incongruity is qualified in the same manner. incongruities that give pleasure, some that give pain, and others that do neither. George Eliot speaks of a grating incongruity. Sydney Smith rejects the explanation absolutely for the case of an Irish bull.

"It is clear," he says, "that a bull cannot depend upon mere incongruity alone; for if a man were to say that he would ride to London upon a cocked hat, or that he would cut his throat with a pound of pickled salmon, this, though completely incongruous, would not be to make bulls, but to talk nonsense. The stronger the apparent connexion, and the more complete the real disconnexion of the ideas, the greater the surprise and the better the bull."

His own explanation of Humour, nevertheless, is wholly based on Incongruity. He gives an example to this effect.

"As you increase the incongruity, you increase the humour; as you diminish it, you diminish the humour. If a tradesman of a corpulent and respectable appearance, with habiliments somewhat ostentatious, were to slide down gently into the mud, and dedecorate a pea-green coat, I am afraid we should all have the barbarity to laugh. If his hat and wig, like treacherous servants, were to desert their falling master, it certainly would not diminish our propensity to laugh; but if he were to fall into a violent passion, and abuse everybody about him, nobody could possibly resist the incongruity of a pea-green tradesman, very respectable, sitting in the mud, and threatening all the passers-by with the effects of his wrath. Here every incident heightens the humour of the scene :-the gaiety of his tunic, the general respectability of his appearance, the rills of muddy water which trickle down his