hall get the bigger lot of blows. Passages
of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of
the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter.
But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere's
laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as
colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible
laughter; but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit. They
quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the
mind accepts them because they are clear interpretations of certain
chapters of the Book lying open before us all. Between these two stand
Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in
one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere's
delicacy.

The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a
sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your habitation
to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among powerful brains too.
You will not find poets--or but a stray one, over-worshipped. You will
find learned men undoubtedly, professors, reputed philosophers, and
illustrious dilettanti. They have in them, perhaps, every element
composing light, except the Comic. They read verse, they discourse of
art; but their eminent faculties are not under that vigilant sense of a
collective supervision, spiritual and present, which we have taken note
of. They build a temple of arrogance; they speak much in the voice of
oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip in grossness, is usually a
form of pugnacity.

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of
the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in
the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the
rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritable
personality. A very learned English professor crushed an argument in a
political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily: 'Are you aware,
sir, that I am a philologer?'

The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the
professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become
their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at least a
fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society named
poli