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carriage, just for nothing but to see how our honours got past."*

It is curious, let me remark, to observe how a form of expression which is essentially a bull, may be lifted out of the region of the ridiculous, as in that truly poetic expression of Keats:

"So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode toward fair Florence."†

Now, if that be looked at in a prosaic point of view, it becomes a downright blunder, but, poetically, you see in it the activity of the imagination darting forward to the murder, a "ghastly foregone conclusion," as Leigh Hunt has well called it.

I have spoken of the incongruity of style: there may also be such incongruity of time as to make the anachronism laughable. Washington Irving, one of the finest of modern humorous writers, has shown this in that practical anachronism: "Rip Van Winkle." It is, I believe, Horace Walpole, who tells of one of the family pictures of the De Levis, a French family that prided itself on its great antiquity; it was a picture of an antediluvian scene, in which Noah was represented going into the ark with a bundle of the archives of the house of De Levi under his arm. I have myself seen in a private library in this city an old Bible, with engravings, Dutch, I believe they were; one of which pictured an Old Testament event; in the foreground Samson slaying the lion, if I remember rightly,

Lockhart's Scott.

Keats's Poetical Works, p. 42. Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.

This is in a note by Lord Dover. Horace Walpole's joke is rather less decorous. Collected Works. vol. ii. p. 298. W. B. R.

and in the background a man with a fowling-piece shooting snipe.

These are broad incongruities, bordering upon the farcical there are others, either wilful or unconscious, which are more delicate in their impression. When Lady Sale made in her diary the simple entry, "Earthquakes as usual," the humour was in the coolness of the womanly courage, and the notion of the frequency coupled with one of the rarest and most appalling of earthly perils. It was not unlike the advertisement beginning, "Anybody in want of a diving-bell," as if a diving-bell was one of the common wants in society. A quaint example recurs to my mind in this connection: it is in Horrebou's History of Iceland, an old folio volume, which is divided into chapters according to various subjects: one of these is headed (chapter 47,) "Concerning Owls." I can quote the whole chapter without fatiguing you, for it is in these words: "There are in Iceland no owls of any kind whatever." Yet the historian seems to have considered himself under some obligation to that species of birds, so far as to devote a chapter to their absence.

These unexpected connections, which are produced by wit or humour, carried beyond the mere ludicrous effect, are seen also subserving argumentation, as these processes are combined by Swift in his "Drapier's Letters," and other occasional pieces; by De Foe, or in later times by Walter Scott, in his letters on the Scotch currency question; and yet more in Sydney Smith's writings, the wittiest reasoning and satire in the language. There is, perhaps no more characteristic passage than that suggested by his reflections on the learned prolixity of Dr. Parr. "There is an event," he goes on to say, "recorded in the Bible,

which men who write books should keep constantly in their remembrance. It is there set forth, that many cen- . turies ago the earth was covered with a great flood, by which the whole of the human race, with the exception of one family, were destroyed. It appears also, that from thence a great alteration was made in the longevity of mankind, who, from a range of seven hundred or eight hundred years, were confined to their present period of seventy or eighty years. This epoch in the history of man gave birth to the twofold division of the antediluvian and the postdiluvian style of writing, the latter of which naturally contracted itself into those inferior limits which were better accommodated to the abridged duration of human life and literary labour. Now to forget this event, to write without the fear of the deluge before his eyes, and to handle a subject as if mankind could lounge over a pamphlet for ten years, as before their submersion, is to be guilty of the most grievous error into which a writer can possibly fall. The author of this book should call in the aid of some brilliant pencil, and cause the distressing scenes of the deluge to be pourtrayed in the most lively colours for his use. He should gaze at Noah, and be brief. The ark should constantly remind him of the little time there is left for reading; and he should learn, as they did in the ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into a very little compass.' ""* This was written in Sydney Smith's early reviewing days; but his wit took a more concentrated form, as when he said of Lord John Russel,

His worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all moral fear; there is nothing he would not undertake. I

* Edinburgh Review, 1809. Works, vol. ii. p. 208.

believe he would perform the operation for the stone, build St. Peter's, or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the channel fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church tumbled down, and the channel fleet been knocked to atoms;" and then he adds quietly in a note, "Another peculiarity of the Russels is, that they never alter their opinions: they are an excellent race, but they must be trepanned before they can be convinced."* Nay, sometimes the subtle element is concentrated in a single word or phrase, as when he speaks of "a gentleman lately from the Pyramids or the upper cataracts, let loose upon the drawing-room;" or that phrase, so excellent in the satire, and admitting unfortunately of such frequent application, which mentions an orator "splashing in the froth of his own rhetoric"'—a descriptive image which is worth a whole chapter of rhetorical admonition.

This combination of wit and reasoning makes also much of the virtue of that instruction which, in Fables, charms the mind of childhood, and is not cast aside by mature reason. It enters, too, into a people's instruction by proverbs, which have been happily described as "the wisdom of many and the wit of one."

One of the most remarkable uses of wit and humour, is that which combines them with tragedy, and makes them subservient to tragic effect. These combinations seem to be denied to modern art by the refinement or daintiness of later times; and by such denial, modern art loses much of the power which resulted from that natural blending of the humorous and the serious, each equally earnest,

Second Letter to Archdeacon Singleton, Works, vol. iii. p. 193, 194.

which may be seen in the early minstrelsy, and in the highest form of genius and art in Shakspeare's deepest tragedies. The most careless reader must have noticed how profoundly the tragic pathos of King Lear is deepened by the wild wit and pathetic humour of that faithful and full-hearted follower-the fool. Remember how, in Hamlet, one of the most solemn scenes is preceded by the quaint professional witticisms of the gravedigger, so different and yet not discordant. In Macbeth the brief and awful interval between the murder of Duncan, and the disclosure of it, is filled with that rudely-comic passage of the drunken, half-sobered porter, to whose gross jocularity you pass from the high-wrought frenzy of Macbeth, reeking with his victim's blood, and from the yet more fearful atrocity of his wife, to return quickly to the tragic horror on the discovery of the murder; and in that transition, through a species of the comic, the harmony is preserved by the quaint allusions to hell and the vain equivocations to heaven.

Another kindred combination, which also shows a unity connecting the serious and the sportive, proving what Socrates is said to have asserted, that there is a common ground for tragedy and comedy, is in that contrast between the thought or feeling and its expression, which is termed "irony." It is the humorous wresting of language from its literal use for the expression of feeling, either happy or painful, but too vehement to be contented with that literal use. The pensive perplexity of a gentle and philosophic soul like Hamlet, bewildered and self-secluded in a wicked world, finds relief in almost every form of bitter or tranquil humour for meditations and for emotions that Overmastered him.. When the thoughtful spirit of Mac

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