Humour; and, had his disposition been less savage and malignant, he would have done so much oftener.

His Gulliver and his Tale of a Tub have a quantity of fine innuendo and irony, applied chiefly to politicians and ecclesiastics; the Battle of the Books takes up scholars. His richness of invention maintains the double attitude so well that we cannot charge him with vituperation properly so called. He has also a certain redeeming purpose; his satire of rulers being moved by an apparently honest sympathy with the governed.

The poem on his own end is a curious selection of circumstances from the worst side of human nature, cunningly contrived to make mankind out selfish, hypocritical and mean. It has no end but to display his invention and gratify his own spite; it must fail to carry his readers with him.

A certain touch of Humour occurs in the passage where Gulliver was kept as a pet of the Brobdignagian princess, and had various mishaps, but always came under her protection. Even here mockery is the prevailing circumstance, only more effective by the dilution in kindliness.

His splendid character-drawing lends itself to both ridicule and humour. Leigh Hunt specially admires 'Mary the Cook-maid's Letter to Dr. Sheridan,' as a happy portrait of incoherence and irrelevance taken from the life. few lines may be given as illustrative of this kind of humour:

A

And the Dean, my master, is an honester man than you and all your kin :

He has more goodness in his little finger, than you have in your whole

body:

My master is a parsonable man, and not a spindle-shank'd hoddydoddy.

And now, whereby I find you would fain make an excuse,
Because my master one day, in anger, call'd you a goose;

Which, and I am sure I have been his servant four years since October,
And he never call'd me worse than sweetheart, drunk or sober.

Fielding provides a rich storehouse of the Ludicrous. There is over his whole work an air of Humour, which is often turned to Satire. He makes ludicrous degradations of the Homeric invocations by using their forms on lowly occasions. In Tom Jones, Molly Seagrim's battle with the parish congregation in the churchyard and her routing

them with a bone, is sung by the Muse in the Homeric style :

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Recount, O Muse, the fate of those who fell on this fatal day. First Jemmy Tweedle felt on his hinder head the direful bone. Him the pleasant banks of sweetlywinding Stour had nourished, where he at first learned the vocal art, with which, wandering up and down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains, when upon the green they interweaved the sprightly dance; while he himself stood fiddling and jumping to his own music. How little now avails his fiddle! He thumps the verdant floor with his carcase. Next old Echepole, the sow-gelder, received a blow in his forehead from our Amazonian heroine, and immediately fell to the ground. He was a swinging fat fellow, and fell with almost as much noise as a house. His tobacco-box dropt at the same time from his pocket, which Molly took up as lawful spoils. . . Tom Freckle, the smith's son, was the next victim to her rage. He was an ingenious workman, and made excellent pattens; nay, the very patten with which he was knocked down was his own workmanship. Had he been at that time singing psalms in the church, he would have avoided a broken head.'

The following are some shorter specimens from Tom Jones :

Sophia's maid divulging to her mistress a secret that she had promised Tom to keep, ends thus:

"So I hope your ladyship will not mention a word for he gave me a crown never to mention it, and made me swear upon a book, but I believe, indeed, it was not the Bible".

The same character says to her mistress:

"It would be very ungrateful in me to desire to leave your ladyship; because as why, I should never get so good a place again".

To illustrate the value of contrast in art, Fielding has a side-stroke of satire against ladies who like an ugly companion for foil:

"The ladies themselves seem so sensible of this, that they are all industrious to procure foils: nay, they will become foils to themselves; for I have observed (at Bath particularly) that they endeavour to appear as ugly as possible in the morning, in order to set off that beauty which they intend to show you in the evening ".

The same subject gives him an opening for an ingeniously ironical stroke of satire :-

"To say the truth, thesé soporific parts [where Homer nods] are so many scenes of serious artfully interwoven, in order to contrast and set off the rest; and this is the true meaning of a late facetious writer, who told the public, that whenever he was dull they might be assured there was a design in it".

It will be sufficient for our purpose of expounding the conditions of success in Humorous creations, to select one more example from our own contemporaries.

In the novels of George Eliot we find abundant examples of the richest humour, accompanied with turns of language that could be brought under Wit; although the epigrammatic type of pure word-play is not aimed at specially, still less the mere pun. She is both satirist and humourist on the great scale. She dives into the inmost recesses of egotism in all its shapes-selfishness, conceit, vanity, hypocrisy, self-delusion; while intellectual imbecility, either as ignorance or as folly, is her special butt. By making ample allowance for real generosity and amiability in her characters, she becomes entitled to the higher praise of humour. Both for serious and for comic effects, she possesses the genius of illustrative comparison and simile in no ordinary measure; and can frame the most delicate innuendos. The theory of Humour can be abundantly confirmed from her examples; it is always at the expense of some one's diguity or consequence; although very often whole classes, or mankind at large, are pointed at. Thus :

"We are so pitiably in subjection to all sorts of vanity --even the very vanities we are practically renouncing". This is intended to take everybody down, and yet we can relish its cleverness.

"No system, religious or political, I believe, has laid it down as a principle that all men are alike virtuous, or even that all the people rated for £80 houses are an honour to their species." Only certain classes are intended here; and those not included will take pleasure in the satire.

If there are two things not to be hidden--love and a cough-I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when

once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head." There is passable humour in the conjunction of love and a cough, and a pretty strong dose of contempt for ignorance; with which the knowing ones will be delighted.

The sayings of the gifted and severe Mrs. Poyser are usually downright and strong; occasionally, they exemplify the author's delicacy of surprise and innuendo. For ex

ample:

"I'm not denyin' the women are foolish; God Almighty made 'em to match the men".

If we were to be critical, for the sake of a Rhetorical lesson, we might say that the humour is sometimes sacrificed to the pungency. The author's judgments of human beings. in general are too severe to be uniformly agreeable. There

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is an unnecessary harshness in such a saying as this:'We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?' Even if there were plausibility in this surmise, it is needlessly grating.

“Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse.' This is clever satire, but not calculated to please. It is typical of an extensive manufacture of witty sayings at the expense of the kindly home relations.

WIT.

1. Wit, in its most distinctive feature, is a play upon words, rendered possible by the frequent plurality of meanings in the same language.

The ingenuity displayed in this exercise may be such as to excite surprise and admiration.

The pleasure of admiration may arise from ingenuity in any work of men; for example, inventions in machinery, as the steam engine; master-strokes of tactics in war, like Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras; discoveries in science, as gravity; skill in games. None of these obtain the designation of Wit.

Pope's definition of Wit—

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed

points to the skilled employment of language generally, and would have been received in his day as a just definition. In our time, a narrower meaning prevails, although not to the exclusion of a wider and vaguer usage. All that class of effects, arising out of the plural meanings of words, is Wit in this narrow sense. By whatever name expressed, there is a notable distinctiveness in the process as a literary art.

The Figure of Speech named Epigram coincides very largely with this meaning of Wit. It is an agreeable effect of surprise, through the play upon words that have more than one meaning. (See PART FIRST, EPIGRAM.)

A distinction is drawn between the Epigram proper and the Pun. It is under this last form that everyday Wit runs into the wildest profusion. Nine-tenths of all the so-called witticisms are puns.

The Paradox is a name for some startling proposition, which owes its force to an apparent contradiction, like the Epigram. Hence it is used among the means for defining and illustrating Wit.

Next to the Epigram, we include effects coming under