betoken the complacency and delight of the heart in the object of its contemplation. Why are we to assume that there must needs be bitterness or contempt in them, when they enforce a truth, or reprove an error? On the contrary, some of those who have been richest in wit and humor, have been among the simplest and kindest-hearted of men. I will only instance Fuller, Bishop Earle, Lafontaine, Matthes Claudius, Charles Lamb. "Le méchant n'est jamais comique," is wisely remarked by De Maistre, when canvassing the pretensions of Voltaire (Soirées, I. 273); and the converse is equally true: le comique, le vrai comique, n'est jamais méchant. A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart; but without kindness there can be no true joy. And what a dull, plodding, tramping, clanking would the ordinary intercourse of society be, without wit to enliven and brighten it! When two men meet, they seem to be kept at bay through the estranging effects of absence, until some sportive sally opens their hearts to each other. Nor does anything spread cheerfulness so rapidly over a whole party, or an assembly of people, however large. Reason expands the soul of the philosopher; Imagination glorifies the poet, and breathes a breath of spring through the young and genial: but, if we take into account the numberless glances and gleams whereby Wit lightens our every-day life, I hardly know what power ministers so bountifully to the innocent pleasures of mankind.

Surely too it cannot be requisite to a man's being in earnest, that he should wear a perpetual frown. Or is there less of sincerity in Nature during her gambols in spring, than during the stiffness and harshness of her wintry gloom? Does not the bird's blithe carolling come from the heart, quite as much as the quadruped's monotonous cry? And is it then altogether impossible to take up one's abode with Truth, and to let all sweet homely feelings grow about it and cluster around it, and to smile upon it as on a kind

father or mother, and to sport with it and hold light and merry talk with it as with a loved brother or sister, and to fondle it and play with it as with a child? In this wise did Socrates and Plato commune with Truth; in this wise Cervantes and Shakespeare. This playfulness of Truth is beautifully represented by Landor, in the Conversation between Marcus Cicero and his brother, in an allegory which has the voice and the spirit of Plato. On the other hand, the outcries of those who exclaim against every sound more lively than a bray or a bleat, as derogatory to Truth, are often prompted, not so much by their deep feeling of the dignity of the truth in question, as of the dignity of the person by whom that truth is asserted. It is our vanity, our self-conceit, that makes us so sore and irritable. grave argument we may reply gravely, and fancy that we have the best of it: but he who is too dull or too angry to smile cannot answer a smile except by fretting and fuming? Olivia lets us into the secret of Malvolio's distaste for the Clown.

To a

For the full expansion of the intellect, moreover, to preserve it from that narrowness and partial warp which our proneness to give ourselves up to the sway of the moment is apt to produce, its various faculties, however opposite, should grow and be trained up side by side, should twine their arms together, and strengthen each other by lovewrestles. Thus will it be best fitted for discerning and acting upon the multiplicity of things which the world sets before it. Thus, too, will something like a balance and order be upheld, and our minds be preserved from that exaggeration on the one side, and depreciation on the other side, which are the sure results of exclusiveness. A poet, for instance, should have much of the philosopher in him; not indeed thrusting itself forward at the surface, this would only make a monster of his work, like the Siamese twins, neither one thing nor two, — but

out of sight; but the A philosopher, on the

latent within; the spindle should be web should be spun by the Fates. other hand, should have much of the poet in him. A historian cannot be great, without combining the elements of the two minds. A statesman ought to unite those of all the three. A great religious teacher, such as Socrates, Bernard, Luther, Schleiermacher, needs the statesman's practical power of dealing with men and things, as well as the historian's insight into their growth and purpose: he needs the philosopher's ideas, impregnated and impersonated by the imagination of the poet. In like manner our graver faculties and thoughts are much chastened and bettered by a blending and interfusion of the lighter, so that "the sable cloud" may "turn forth her silver lining on the night": while our lighter thoughts require the graver to substantiate them and keep them from evaporating. Thus Socrates is said in Plato's Banquet to have maintained that a great tragic poet ought likewise to be a great comic poet: an observation the more remarkable, because the tendency of the Greek mind, as at once manifested in their Polytheism, and fostered by it, was to insulate all its ideas, and as it were to split up the intellectual world into a cluster of Cyclades; whereas the appetite for union and fusion, often leading to confusion, is the characteristic of modern times. The combination, however, was realized in himself, and in his great pupil, and may perhaps have been so to a certain extent in Eschylus, if we may judge from the fame of his satiric dramas. At all events, the assertion, as has been remarked more than once, - for instance, by Coleridge (Remains, II. 12), is a wonderful prophetical intuition, which has received its fulfilment in Shakespeare. No heart would have been strong enough to hold the woe of Lear and Othello, except that which had the unquenchable elasticity of Falstaff and the Midsummer Night's Dream. He, too, is an example that the perception of the ridiculous does not

-

necessarily imply bitterness and scorn. Along with his intense humor, and his equally intense, piercing insight into the darkest, most fearful depths of human nature, there is still a spirit of universal kindness, as well as universal justice, pervading his works: and Ben Jonson has left us a precious memorial of him, where he calls him "My gentle Shakespeare." This one epithet sheds a beautiful light on his character: its truth is attested by his wisdom; which could never have been so perfect, unless it had been harmonized by the gentleness of the dove. A similar union of the graver and lighter powers is found in several of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and in many others among the greatest poets of the modern world: in Boccaccio, in Cervantes, in Chaucer, in Goethe, in Tieck: so was it in Walter Scott.

But He who came to set us an example how we ought to walk never indulged in wit or ridicule, and thereby showed that such levities are not becoming in those who profess to follow him.

I have heard this argument alleged, but could never feel its force. Jesus did indeed set us an example, which it behooves us to follow in all things: we cannot follow it too closely, too constantly. It is the spirit of his example, however, that we are to follow, not the letter. We are to endeavor that the principles of our actions may be the same which he manifested in his, but not to cleave servilely to the outward form. For as he did many things which we cannot do, as he had a power and a wisdom which lie altogether beyond our reach, so are there many things which beseem us in our human, earthly relations, but which it did not enter into his purpose to sanction by his express example. Else on the selfsame grounds it might be contended, that it does not befit a Christian to be a husband or a father, seeing that Jesus has set us no example of these two sacred relations. It might be contended, with equal

justice, that there ought to be no statesmen, no soldiers, no lawyers, no merchants, that no one should write a book, - that poetry, history, philosophy, science, ought all to be thrown overboard, and banished forever from the field of lawful human occupations. As rationally might it be argued, that, because there are no trees or houses in the sky, it is therefore profane and sinful to plant trees and build houses on the earth. Jeremy Taylor, in his Exhortation to the Imitation of the Life of Christ, when speaking of the things which Christ did, but which are not "imitable by us," touches on this very point (Vol. II. p. lxvii.). “We never read (he says) that Jesus laughed, and but once that he rejoiced in spirit: but the declensions of our natures cannot bear the weight of a perpetual grave deportment, without the intervals of refreshment and free alacrity."

to

In fact, the aim and end of all our Lord's teaching, draw men away from sin to the knowledge and love of God, was such that wit and ridicule, even had they been compatible with the pure heavenliness of his spirit, could have found no place in it. For the dealings of Wit are with incongruities regarded intellectually, rather than morally,— with absurdities and follies, rather than with vices and sins: and when it attacks the latter, it tries chiefly to point out their absurdity and folly, the moral feeling being for the time kept half in abeyance. But though there is no recorded instance of our Lord's making use of any of the weapons of wit, nor is it conceivable that he ever did so, a severe, taunting irony is sanctioned by the example of the Hebrew Prophets, as in Isaiah's sublime invective against idolatry, and in Elijah's controversy with the priests of Baal,and by that of St. Paul, especially in the fourth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. Surely, too, one may say with Milton, in his Animadversions on the Remonstrant, that "this vein of laughing hath ofttimes a strong and sinewy