iric effort pretending to the treasures of
ambiguity.

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the
feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But
the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of
the Comic poet.

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him.
The juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the
two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound
in one by laughter. The knight's great aims and constant mishaps, his
chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along
the highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks
out of derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking
through the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in
the loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
narrative.

The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy
in his laughter.

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our
description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of
festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under
the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear
solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and
infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged
thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the
lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. The
comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid
comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. But
ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will fly
straight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will
also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful
choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of
his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often
wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon
History or Society are given to be capricious. They are, as in the
case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings
are primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the other hand, is an
interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason