, the profession has produced no such wit; since Goldsmith, no
author so successful.

Five years ago it would have been only Dr. Holmes's intimate friends
that would have considered the remarkable success he has achieved not
only possible, but probable. They knew, that, if the fitting opportunity
should only come, he would soon show how much stuff he had in
him,--sterner stuff, too, than the world had supposed,--stuff not
merely to show off the iris of a brilliant reputation, but to block out
into the foundations of an enduring fame. It seems an odd thing to say
that Dr. Holmes had suffered by having given proof of too much wit; but
it is undoubtedly true. People in general have a great respect for those
who scare them or make them cry, but are apt to weigh lightly one who
amuses them. They like to be tickled, but they would hardly take the
advice of their tickler on any question they thought serious. We have
our doubts whether the majority of those who make up what is called "the
world" are fond of wit. It rather puts them out, as Nature did Fuseli:
They look on its crinkling play as men do at lightning; and while they
grant it is very fine, are teased with an uncomfortable wonder as to
where it is going to strike next. They would rather, on the whole,
it were farther off. They like well-established jokes, the fine old
smoked-herring sort, such as the clown offers them in the circus,
warranted never to spoil, if only kept dry enough. Your fresh wit
demands a little thought, perhaps, or at least a kind of negative wit,
in the recipient. It is an active, meddlesome--quality, forever putting
things in unexpected and somewhat startling relations to each other;
and such new relations are as unwelcome to the ordinary mind as poor
relations to a _nouveau riche_. Who wants to be all the time painfully
conceiving of the antipodes walking like flies on the ceiling? Yet wit
is related to some of the profoundest qualities of the intellect. It is
the reasoning faculty acting _per saltum_, the sense of analogy brought
to a focus; it is generalization in a flash, logic by the electric
telegraph, the sense of likeness in unlikeness, that lies at the root
of all discoveries; it is the prose imagination, common-sense at fourth
proof. All this is no reason why the world should like it, however; and
we fancy that the Question, _Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?_ was
plaintively put in the primitive tongue by one of the world's gray
father