, or of little boys birched at school.

The actions of people in pain are strange and abnormal, and sometimes
seem unaccountable; it is not the mere suffering at which any are
amused. We can sometimes laugh at a person, although we feel for him,
where the incentive to mirth is much stronger than the call for
sympathy. Still we confess that some of the old malice lingers among us,
some skulking cruelty peeps out at intervals. Fiendish laughter has
departed with the Middle Ages, but what delights the schoolboy more than
the red-hot poker in the pantomime?

Wit is chiefly to be recommended as a source of enjoyment; to many this
will seem no great or legitimate object, for we cannot help drawing a
very useful distinction between pleasure and profit. The lines,

"There are whom heaven has blessed with store of wit
Yet want as much again to manage it;
For wit and judgment ever are at strife,
Though meant, each others, and like man and wife,"

teach us that talent of this kind may be often turned into a fruitful
channel. The politician can by humour influence his audience; the man of
society can make himself popular, and perhaps without this
recommendation would never have had an opportunity of gaining his
knowledge of the world. When by some happy turn of thought we are
successful in raising a laugh, we seem to receive a kind of ovation, the
more valuable because sincere. We are allowed a superiority, we have
achieved a victory, though it may be but momentary and unimportant.

In daily life our sense of the ludicrous leads us to mark many small
errors and blemishes, which we should have overlooked had it not given
us pleasure to notice them, and thus from observing the failures of
others we learn to correct our own. Much that would be offensive, if not
injurious, is thus avoided, and those little angles are removed which
obstruct the onward course of society. A sensible man will gain more by
being ridiculed than praised, just as adverse criticism, when judicious,
ought to raise rather than depress. Lever remarks, with regard to
acquiring languages, that "as the foreigner is too polite to laugh, the
stranger has little chance to learn." A compendium of humorous sayings
would, if rightly read, give a valuable history of our shortcomings in
the different relations of life. Louis XII., when urged to punish some
insolent comedian, replied, "No, no; in the course of their ribaldry
they may sometimes tell us useful trut