en taken from the author's own experience. The best
kind of humour is the most artistic embellishment of the ludicrous.

The fact that humour is often found in comparisons, probably led Leon
Dumont to consider that it arose from the meeting of two opposite ideas
in the mind. But often there is no contrast. It does not always strike
us that the state of things present before us is different from some
other clearly defined condition. We do not necessarily see that a thing
is wrong as differing from something else, but as opposing some
standard in our minds which it is often difficult to determine. We
sometimes laugh at another person's costume, though it does not occur to
us that he should be dressed as ourselves, or according to some
particular fashion, nor could we point out at what precise point it
diverges from the code of propriety. But by reflecting we could probably
mark the deviation. The ludicrous often suggests comparisons; when we
see something absurd we often try to find a resemblance to something
else, but this is after we have been amused, and we sometimes say of a
very ridiculous man, that we "do not know what he is like."

Humorous complications appear under many forms and disguises. The
Americans have lately introduced an indifferent kind of it under the
form of an ellipse--an omission of some important matter. Thus, the
editor of a Western newspaper announces that if any more libels are
published about him, there will be several first class funerals in his
neighbourhood. Again, "An old Maine woman undertook to eat a gallon of
oysters for one hundred dollars. She gained fifteen--the funeral costing
eighty-five." Another common form of humorous complication is taking an
expression in a different sense from that it usually bears. "You cannot
eat your cake, and have your cake;" "But how," asks the wilful child,
"am I to eat my cake, if I don't have it?" Thackeray speaks of a young
man who possessed every qualification for success--except talent and
industry.

In many other common forms of speech there are openings for specious
amendments, sometimes for real ones, especially in ironical expressions.
But as in pronunciation we regard usage rather than etymology, so in
sense the true meaning is not the literal or grammatical, but the
conventional. Much indifferent humour is made of question and
answer;--the reply being given falsely, as if the interrogation were put
in a different sense from that intended, an