n all essentials strictly
matter of fact.

There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I
would fain say something--and that is an occasional outbreak of sudden,
and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this,
sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and
to insist on being attended to, and expressed: it is perhaps too much
the way with all of us now-a-days, to be forever joking. _Mr. Punch_, to
whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun,
especially in his Leech, leads the way; and our two great novelists,
Thackeray and Dickens, the first especially, are, in the deepest and
highest sense, essentially humorists,--the best, nay, indeed the almost
only good thing in the latter, being his broad and wild fun; Swiveller,
and the Dodger, and Sam Weller, and Miggs, are more impressive far to my
taste than the melo-dramatic, utterly unreal Dombey, or his strumous and
hysterical son, or than all the later dreary trash of "Bleak House," &c.

My excuse is, that these papers are really what they profess to be, done
at bye-hours. _Dulce est desipere_, when in its fit place and time.
Moreover, let me tell my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face, and
step, and neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and
kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are
stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a
medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or
care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has
little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained.
My Edinburgh readers will recall many excellent jokes of their
doctors--"Lang Sandie Wood," Dr. Henry Davidson our _Guy Patin_ and
better, &c.

I may give an instance, when a joke was more and better than itself. A
comely young wife, the "cynosure" of her circle, was in bed, apparently
dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible
abscess stopping the way; she could swallow nothing; everything had been
tried. Her friends were standing round her bed in misery and
helplessness. "_Try her wi' a compliment_," said her husband, in a not
uncomic despair. She had genuine humor, as well as he; and as
physiologists know, there is a sort of mental tickling which is beyond
and above control, being under the reflex system, and instinctive as
well as sighing. She