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air my Affinity! O 'tis too mutch! too mutch'; and she sobbed agin.

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'Yes,' I anserd, 'I think it is a darn site too mutch!'

Hast thou not yearned for me?" she yelled, ringin her hands like a female play acter.

'Not a yearn!' I bellerd at the top of my voice, throwin her away from me.

We may now attend, appreciatively, to some points of difference between wit and humor. Wit pertains rather to ideas, is thus more sudden, startling, transient; humor pertains rather to persons and things, is more continuous, forms the staple of the comic in life and literature.

Humor is all. Wit should be only brought

To turn agreeably some proper thought.—Buckingham. Wit is brilliant, cutting, more admirable, liable to pall on repetition; humor is milder, the gently mirthful, long drawn out, less to be feared, immortal by its truthfulness to nature- - at least in its best developments, as for instance, the character of Falstaff. While wit is more purely intellectual, humor implies an admixture of sentiment. Even Mark Twain moralizes, illustrating the fact, as do the biographies of most humorists and wits, that in the fabric of their emotions the warp of melancholy is crossed by the woof of cheerfulness.

Mr. Whipple, one of the best of observers, draws the distinction as follows:

Wit is abrupt, darting, scornful, and tosses its analogies in your face; Humor is slow and shy, insinuating its fun into your heart. Wit is negative, analytical, destructive; Humor is creative. The couplets of Pope are witty, but Sancho Panza is a humorous creation. Wit, when earnest, has the earnestness of passion, seeking to destroy; Humor has the earnestness of affection, and would lift up what is seemingly low into our charity and love. Wit, bright, rapid, and blasting as the lightning, flashes, strikes, and vanishes in an instant; Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light. Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of sur

prise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines; Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is a human influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, promoting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.

When wit and humor are employed to influence opinion, the product is ridicule. The difference lies in the intention, to excite contempt or aversion. Thus the authors of Rejected Addresses, in lines ostensibly on the rebuilding. of Drury Lane Theatre, ridicule the materialistic doctrine of Lucretius as revived by modern science:

From floating elements in chaos hurled,

Self-formed of atoms, sprang the infant world.
No great First Cause inspired the happy plot,
But all was matter,- and no matter what,-
Atoms attracted by some law occult,

Settling in spheres,—this globe was the result.

I sing how casual bricks, in airy climb,

Encountered casual cow-hairs, casual lime;

How rafters, borne through wandering clouds elate,
Kissed in their slope blue elemental slate,

Clasped solid beams in chance-directed fury,

And gave to birth our renovated Drury.

Lowell's Biglow Papers, written in the days of slavery, and based on the most clear conviction of justice, and its opposite, hold a very high place in literature of this class.

The special literary form for ridicule, it will be seen, is satire; the earliest poetical specimen of which is, in English, Langland's Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman; and the greatest, Butler's Hudibras, aimed at the hypocrisy in the Puritan party. Not unlike this, and written on the Roman model of heroic metre (of which Horace and Juvenal are well-known examples), are Dryden's Hind and Panther, a defence of the Romish Church against the English; Pope's Rape of the Lock, which magnifies the

trivial, and Dunciad, which belittles the great; Byron's vigorous English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Thackeray, in all his novels, lashes the hollowness and insincerity of modern society. Shams (in the United States) are the central theme of Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit. The character of Pecksniff, for instance, `who regards piety as needful coin, and names his daughters Mercy and Charity, is thus drawn:

Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus' purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy-book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there, but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all. His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, 'There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace; a holy calm pervades me.' So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-gray, which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek ⚫ though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower, and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, 'Behold the moral Pecksniff!'

Irony is disguised ridicule, and in controversy, as it gives an opponent no handle, becomes an embarrassing instrument of vituperation. Among Englishmen, Swift was the great master of the art. See his Tale of a Tub, which ridicules the Romanists and Presbyterians with a view to exalting the Church of England; and his Gulliver,

which, under the cloak of a voyager's journal, teaches the insignificance, vanity and falseness of human pursuits, ambitions, and hopes. A mocking goblin sits at his elbow to chill enthusiasm, to give imagination the lie, and to explode the bubbles of the ideal.

For keeping in check the follies and vices of those who are governed by no higher principle than the world's dread laugh,' for correcting the lighter foibles and incon sistencies of even good men, for removing abuses in philosophy, religion, and politics, ridicule has often proved the most effective weapon. Men and institutions can endure odium more easily than laughter.

In argument, ridicule puts an adversary hors de combat. A grave reply can never wound it. Says the elder Disraeli: Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those chimeras of hell which the sword of Eneas could not pierce-yet these shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have made heroism tremble, turned the eloquence of wisdom into folly, and bowed down the spirit of honor itself.' When it is directed against goodness and purity, when it withers genius, and gibbets what ought to be enshrined, ridicule becomes the greatest of evils. The sneer and the malignant sarcasm are the appropriate language of devils, like Goethe's Mephistopheles and Byron's Lucifer.

CHAPTER XVI.

DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION

EPISTLE.

Nothing gives so just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history waits for its last seal from them.-HORACE WALPOLE.

NE

EXT to the essay, which we are to consider presently, the letter is the most agreeable as well as the most instructive form of the minor literature. On the one hand, it is the most familiar species of writing, and approaches the nearest to ordinary conversation; on the other, its written disclosures help us to a knowledge of individual character and of the movements of mankind, affording interesting pictures of the times, and materials for literary and political history. Of no slight historical value, for instance, are the earliest English specimens, the correspondence of the Paston family during the era of the wars of York and Lancaster. Treating, in plain and artless language, of private affairs, they explain and illuminate incidentally much of the national, domestic, and social condition and the course of public events.

As the English became a literary people, familiar letters served as a vehicle for the feelings, opinions, and reflections of our authors. Bishop Hall, in a dedication to the son of James I, claims the honor of introducing 'this new fashion of discourse by epistles, new to our language, usual to others; and as novelty is never without plea of use, more free, more familiar.' James Howell gave us his own times, as well as his own history, in 'Familiar letters, domestic and foreign, historical, political, and philosophical, upon emergent occasions.' Perhaps our most famous

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