ping the limits of the
sublime into its proverbial opposite; and they humbly try to amuse us
because they can't strike us with awe. This, too, if I may venture to
say so, is good in its way and place; and it seems rather hard to these
luckless writers when people assume that, because they make jokes on a
mountain, they are necessarily insensible to its awful sublimities. A
sense of humour is not incompatible with imaginative sensibility; and
even Wordsworth might have been an equally powerful prophet of nature if
he could sometimes have descended from his stilts. In short, a man may
worship mountains, and yet have a quiet joke with them when he is
wandering all day in their tremendous solitudes.

Joking, however, is, it must be admitted, a dangerous habit. I freely
avow that, in my humble contributions to Alpine literature, I have
myself made some very poor and very unseasonable witticisms. I confess
my error, and only wish that I had no worse errors to confess. Still I
think that the poor little jokes in which we mountaineers sometimes
indulge have been made liable to rather harsh constructions. We are
accused, in downright earnest, not merely of being flippant, but of an
arrogant contempt for all persons whose legs are not as strong as our
own. We are supposed seriously to wrap ourselves in our own conceit, and
to brag intolerably of our exploits. Now I will not say that no
mountaineer ever swaggers: the quality called by the vulgar "bounce" is
unluckily confined to no profession. Certainly I have seen a man
intolerably vain because he could raise a hundred-weight with his little
finger; and I dare say that the "champion bill-poster," whose name is
advertised on the walls of this metropolis, thinks excellence in
bill-posting the highest virtue of a citizen. So some men may be silly
enough to brag in all seriousness about mountain exploits. However, most
lads of twenty learn that it is silly to give themselves airs about mere
muscular eminence; and especially is this true of Alpine
exploits--first, because they require less physical prowess than almost
any other sport, and secondly, because a good amateur still feels
himself the hopeless inferior of half the Alpine peasants whom he sees.
You cannot be very conceited about a game in which the first clodhopper
you meet can give you ten minutes' start in an hour. Still a man writing
in a humorous vein naturally adopts a certain bumptious tone, just as
our friend "Punch" o