might include all classes, all sects, all professions, making them stand out on his luminous page in the clear light of reality, doing justice to all by allowing each its own costume and language, compelling Falsehood to give itself the lie, and Pride to stand abased before its own image, and guided in all his pictures of life and character by a spirit at once tolerant, just, generous, humane, and national.

It has been justly objected to New England society, that it is too serious and prosaic. It cannot take a joke. It demands the reason of all things, or their value in the current coin of the land. It is nervous, fidgety, unreposing, full of trouble. Striving hard to make even religion a torment, it clothes in purple and fine linen its apostles of despair. Business is followed with such a devouring intensity of purpose, that it results as often in dyspepsia as in wealth. We are so overcome with the serious side of things, that our souls rarely come out in irrepressible streams of merriment. The venerable King Cole would find few subjects here to acknowledge his monarchy of mirth. In the foppery of our utilitarianism, we would frown down all recreations which have not a logical connection with mental improvement or purse improvement. For those necessary accompaniments of

* Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, December, 1845.

all life out of the Insane Asylum,- qualities which the most serious and sublime of Christian poets has described with the utmost witchery of his fancy,—

'Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,

Nods, and becks, and wreathéd smiles,

Sport, that wrinkled Care derides,

And Laughter holding both his sides,” —

for these we have the suspicious glance, the icy speech, the self-involved and mysterious look. We are gulled by all those pretences which require a vivid sense of the ludicrous to be detected; and with all our boasted intelligence, there is hardly a form of quackery and fanaticism which does not thrive better by the side of our schools and colleges than anywhere else. And the reason is, we lack generally the faculty or feeling of ridicule, the counterfeit-detector all over the world. We have, perhaps, sufficient respect for the great, the majestic, and the benevolent; but we are deficient in the humorous insight to detect roguery and pretence under their external garbs. As we cannot laugh at our own follies, so we cannot endure being laughed at. A Grubstreet scribbler, tossing at us from a London garret a few lightning-bugs of jocularity, can set our whole population in a flame. Public indignation is the cheapest article of domestic manufacture. There is no need of a tariff to protect that. We thus give altogether too much

importance to unimportant things,-breaking butterflies on the wheel, and cannonading grasshoppers; and our dignity continually exhales in our spasmodic efforts to preserve it.

Now it is an undoubted fact that the principle of Mirth is as innate in the mind as any other original faculty. The absence of it, in individuals or communities, is a defect; for there are various forms of error and imposture which wit, and wit alone, can expose and punish. Without a well-trained capacity to perceive the ludicrous, the health suffers, both of the body and the mind; seriousness dwindles into asceticism, sobriety degenerates into bigotry, and the natural order of things gives way to the vagaries of distempered imaginations. "He who laughs," said the mother of Goethe, "can commit no deadly sin." The Emperor Titus thought he had lost a day if he had passed it without laughing. Sterne contends that every laugh lengthens the term of our lives. Wisdom, which represents the marriage of Truth and Virtue, is by no means synonymous with gravity. She is L'Allegro as well as Il Penseroso, and jests as well as preaches. The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common-sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. Almost

every sensible remark on a folly is a witty remark. Wit is thus often but the natural language of wisdom, viewing life with a piercing and passionless eye. Indeed, nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts, that wit often consists in the mere statement and comparison of facts; as when Hume says, that the ancient Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a ring; as when Voltaire remarks, that Penn's treaty with the Indians was the only one ever made between civilized men and savages not sanctioned by an oath, and the only one that ever was kept. In the same vein of wise sarcasm is the observation that France under the Ancient Regime was an absolute monarchy moderated by songs, and that Russia is a despotism tempered by assassination; or the old English proverb, that he who preaches war is the devil's chaplain.

In view of this ludicrous side of things, perceived by Wit and Humor, I propose in this lecture to discourse of Mirth, its philosophy, its literature, its influence. The breadth of the theme forbids a complete treatment of it, for to Wit and Humor belong much that is important in history and most agreeable in letters. The mere mention of a few of the great wits and humorists of the world will show the extent of the subject, viewed simply in its literary aspect; for to Mirth belong the exhaustless fancy and sky-piercing buffooneries of Aristophanes ;