by no means choose to do, from what we should
be eager enough to see, if it was once done. We delight in seeing things
which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be, to see
redressed. This noble capital, the pride of England and of Europe, I
believe no man is so strangely wicked as to desire to see destroyed by a
conflagration or an earthquake, though he should be removed himself to
the greatest distance from the danger. But suppose such a fatal accident
to have happened, what numbers from all parts would crowd to behold the
ruins, and among them many who would have been content never to have
seen London in its glory."

So much for the causes of the pleasure experienced from tragedy. But how
are we to account for the delight received from comedy? Some have
imagined it to arise from a bad pride which men feel at seeing their
fellow-creatures humiliated, and the frailties and follies of their
neighbours exposed. The fact is indubitable, be the cause what it may.
The great moral philosopher quoted above, in another part of his works,
shrewdly observes, "In the disasters of their friends, people are seldom
wanting in a laudable patience. When they are such as do not threaten to
end fatally, they become even matter of pleasantry." The falling of a
person in the street, or his plunging into the gutter, excites the
laughter of those who witness the accident: but let the fall be
dangerous, or let a bone be broke, and then comic feelings give way to
the sympathetic emotions which belong to tragedy. On a superficial
consideration, the delight we feel in tragedy bears the aspect of a
cruel tendency in our hearts, yet it is implanted in us for the purposes
of mutual beneficence. The pleasure we feel in comedy, too, looks like a
malignity in our nature; but why may not it, like the other, be resolved
into an instinct working us to some useful purpose without our
concurrence?

The end of comedy, like that of satire, is to correct the disorders of
mankind by exhibiting their faults and follies in ridiculous and
contemptible attitudes. The tendency we feel to laugh at each other's
foibles, or at those misadventures which denote weakness in us, being
implanted by the hands of Providence, was no doubt given to us for
special purposes of good, and in all probability to make men without the
least intervention of will or reason, moral guides and instructers to
each other. It is allowed by the soundest philosophers that ridicule h