h the true welfare of the people; for its responsibilities
extend over the entire social system.

* * * * *

=_Edwin P. Whipple, 1819-._= (Manual, p. 501.)

From "Literature and Life."

=_236._= WIT AND HUMOR IN LITERATURE.

Every student of English theological literature knows that much of its
best portions gleams with wit. Five of the greatest humorists that ever
made the world ring with laughter were priests,--Rabelais, Scarron,
Swift, Sterne, and Sydney Smith. The prose works of Milton are radiant
with satire of the sharpest kind. Sydney Smith, one of the most
benevolent, intelligent and influential Englishmen of the nineteenth
century, a man of the most accurate insight and extensive information,
embodied the large stores of his practical wisdom in almost every form
of the ludicrous. Many of the most important reforms in England are
directly traceable to him. He really laughed his countrymen out of some
of their most cherished stupidities of legislation.

And now let us be just to Mirth. Let us be thankful that we have in Wit
a power before which the pride of wealth and the insolence of office are
abased; which can transfix bigotry and tyranny with arrows of lightning;
which can strike its object over thousands of miles of space, across
thousands of years of time; and which, through its sway over an
universal weakness of man, is an everlasting instrument to make the bad
tremble and the foolish wince. Let us be grateful for the social and
humanizing influences of Mirth. Amid the sorrow, disappointment, agony,
and anguish of the world,--over dark thoughts and tempestuous passions,
the gloomy exaggerations of self-will, the enfeebling illusions of
melancholy,--Wit and Humor, light and lightning, shed their soft
radiance, or dart their electric flash. See how life is warmed and
illumined by Mirth! See how the beings of the mind, with which it has
peopled our imaginations, wrestle with the ills of existence,--feeling
their way into the harshest or saddest meditations, with looks that defy
calamity; relaxing muscles made rigid with pain; hovering o'er the couch
of sickness, with sunshine and laughter in their beneficent faces;
softening the austerity of thoughts whose awful shadows dim and
darken the brain,--loosening the gripe of Misery as it tugs at the
heart-strings! Let us court the society of these gamesome, and genial,
and sportive, and sparkling beings,--whom Genius has left