the

beth is distorted by guilt, and as the agony of that guilt grows more and more intense, the pent-up misery either flows forth in a subdued irony, or breaks out in that which is fierce and frenzied. In one very familiar passage, beauty of the expression makes many a reader forget that it is pure and essential irony: when Macbeth puts to the Doctor the simple and literal inquiry after Lady Mabeth:

"How does your patient, doctor?
Doctor. Not so sick, my lord,

As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,

That keep her from her rest."

Then comes the deep feeling, with its ironical questions, sounding more like soliloquy :

"Cure her of that:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?

Raze out the written troubles of the brain?

And, with some sweet, oblivious antidote,

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous grief
Which weighs upon the heart?"

The literal answer

"Therein the patient

Must minister to himself"—

brings him back to reality with the exclamation,

"Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it!"

But, even in the irritable putting on of his armour, the bitter relief of an ironical humour comes again in another form:

"What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug

Would scour these English hence?"

If the truthfulness of such use of irony be doubted, let

it be remembered how abundantly and remarkably it pervades Holy Writ. I do not refer merely to the bitter, ironical taunts which the prophet hurled at the priests of Baal, but to the manifold use of it in the expression of thoughts and emotions affecting the spiritual intercourse of man and his Maker. Remember how something of the kind breaks out in the very midst of St. Paul's most solemn argument. Again, it is not contrary to nature— it is not a levity unworthy of man's nature-that these playful faculties make their appearance in the most awful realities of life. The gentle spirit of Anne Boleyn was pleasant with the headsman on the scaffold; and so

"More's gay genius played

With the inoffensive sword of native wit,

Than the bare axe more luminous and keen."*

The power of wit to combine itself harmoniously and vigorously with sagacity and seriousness, is eminently exemplified in all the works of that remarkable author of the seventeenth century, the church historian, Thomas Fuller, whose wit, in the largeness of its circuit, the variety of its expression, its exuberance, and its admirable sanity, stands second only to that of Shakspeare. It has the indispensable merit of perfect naturalness, and the excellence of being a growth from a soil of sound wisdom. There are no large works in our language so thoroughly ingrained with wit and humour as Fuller's "Worthies of England," his Church History of Britain no less so, and the essays entitled "The Holy and Profane State"essays which, in wit, and wisdom, and just feeling, are not unlike the Elia Essays of Charles Lamb. The genius

* Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Sonnet 22.

of Fuller is, perhaps, unequalled in harmonizing a play upon words, quiet jocularity, kindly irony, with thoughtfulness and genuine earnestness, and in making the transition from quaintness to sublimity.

The great satire of the eighteenth century, "Gulliver's Travels," exemplifies another form of wit, too often repulsive, not only by indecent coarseness, but by that misanthropy which darkens the writings of Swift. His morbid contemplation of the vices and follies of his fellow-beings betrays the disease which, probably, clung to his whole life, distorting and darkening it with the dread that insanity had a lurking-place in his brain-that haunting consciousness, which once was expressed when walking with the author of the Night Thoughts, (like himself a dealer in distempered fancies and feelings,) Swift, after gazing earnestly at a noble elm which was, in its uppermost branches, withered and decayed, pointing to it, said to Dr. Young, "I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top."* Arbuthnot, the friend of Swift and Pope, is believed to have had more learning and as much wit as either of them, and with it all a sweetness of temper and purity of character which made Swift exclaim, “Oh, if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels!" It is a sad pity that his genius was not more open to influences of such a character, or of the equally admirable and amiable nature of his other friend, Bishop Berkeley.

The best and most agreeable specimen of English humour (it is humour in contrast to wit) which belongs to that period, is Steele's invention, and Addison's use, of the

* Scott's Life of Swift, p. 291. Am. ed.

character of Sir Roger de Coverley. This will be felt by any one who will select the papers in the Spectator which are devoted to him, and read them continuously, following the good knight to his mansion, to the assizes, to the parish church, where, as soon as he wakes out of a nap during the sermon, he sends his footman to wake up any of the congregation who chance to be asleep; then onward to his death-bed, after having bequeathed (his will chanced to be written on a very cold day) a stout frieze coat to the men, and a comfortable hood to the women, in the parish. The same species of pure, genial, wise, and healthful humour has been sustained in the incomparable Vicar of Wakefield, and in the writings of our countryman, Washington Irving, who is gifted with many of the best qualities of Goldsmith's genius. Among the humorous writers belonging to the literature of our own day, (there are several whom I will not stop to name,) Charles Lamb represented a form of humour of a very high order, and peculiar to himself—a humour which has assumed a deeper interest and commands a higher admiration, now that we know the terrible memories and sorrows of his days—

"The troubles strange,

Many and strange, that hung about his life,”*

and his heroic self-devotion to his afflicted sister.

Our English literature of wit and humour gives abundant proof that these faculties may be either a precious or a perilous possession; precious, as ministering to thoughtful cheerfulness, and serving the cause of truth and gentleness; perilous, as coupled with intellectual pride and

* Wordsworth's Lines, written after the death of Charles Lamb, p. 467, Am. ed.

malevolent passions. I have spoken of the repulsive character of the wit of Dean Swift-still, if unattractive, there was something in his stern hatred of vice and folly, which commands respect; but when you turn to such as Lord Byron's, (as in Don Juan,) there is disease without a particle of the dignity of disease; there is lawless force of mind, owning no restraint of reverence for aught human or divine-sustained by no self-respect, by no confidence in virtue-womanly, even less than manly. Thus wit sinks down into barren scoffing. It is the lowest moral condition when crime clothes itself with jest. Salutary as the culture of the faculties of wit and humour may be, when justly proportioned and controlled, the indulgence of them as a habit is as injurious to him who so indulges it, as it is wearisome to all who encounter it. The habit of always looking at things on the laughable side is sure to lower the tone of thought and feeling, and at length can only content its restless craving by attributing the ridiculous to things which ought to be inviolate by such association. When the habitual joker is sometimes seized with a fit of seriousness, the change is such an incongruity, as to provoke the retaliation of unseasonable jocularity, and no one is as sensitive to ridicule as he who habitually handles it.

Another abuse which may be observed in intercourse with the world, is when jocularity is employed as subterfuge, to escape from the demands of earnestness and candour, and the jest is made a method of non-committal. It is said that Sir Robert Walpole used to divert his guests away from political conversation by a strain of ribald jesting; and a more modern prime minister, the late Lord Melbourne, is described as one whose first impulse, in ordi