n. It is thought that a diligent use
of the muscles in physical labour may detract from the disposition,
time, and power of excessive speech. Paul gives a similar suggestion,
"And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work
with your own hands as we commanded you" (1 Thes. iv. 11).

* * * * *

With these few words of advice I now leave you, my friend Monopolist,
hoping they may have their due effect upon your talking faculty, and
that when I meet you again in company I shall find you a "new edition,
much amended and abridged:" "the half better than the whole."

II.

_THE FALSE HUMOURIST._

"There are more faults in the humour than in the mind."--LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD.

Among the various kinds of talk there is, perhaps, none in which talkers
are more liable to fail than in humour. It is that in which most persons
like to excel, but which comparatively few attain. It is not the man
whose imagination teems with monsters, whose head is filled with
extravagant conceptions, that furnishes innocent pleasure by humour. And
yet there are those who claim to be humourists, whose humour consists
only in wild irregular fancies and distortions of thought. They speak
nonsense, and think they are speaking humour. When they have put
together a round of absurd, inconsistent ideas, and produce them, they
cannot do it without laughing. I have sometimes met with a portion of
this class that have endeavoured to gain themselves the reputation of
wits and humourists by such monstrous conceits as almost qualified them
for Bedlam, rather than refined and intelligent society. They did not
consider that humour should always lie under the check of reason; and
requires the direction of the nicest judgment, by so much the more it
indulges in unrestrained freedoms. There is a kind of nature in this
sort of conversation, as well as in other; and a certain regularity of
thought which must discover the speaker to be a man of sense, at the
same time he appears a man given up to caprice. For my part, when I hear
the delirious mirth of an unskilful talker, I cannot be so barbarous as
to divert myself with it, but am rather apt to pity the man than laugh
at anything he speaks.

"It is indeed much easier," says Addison, "to describe what is not
humour than what is; and very difficult to define it otherwise than as
Cowley has done wit, by negatives. Were I to give my own notions of it,