“Pray, Sir,” said the judge, “how do you know he said Mass?”

“Because I heard him say it, my Lord.”

“Did he say it in Latin?” asked the judge.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Then you understand Latin?”

“A little.”

“What words did you hear him say?”

“Ave Maria.”

“That is the Lord’s Prayer, is it not?” asked the judge.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Here is a pretty witness to convict the prisoner!” cried the judge; “he swears Ave Maria is Latin for the Lord’s Prayer!”

Now, surely, this scene is hardly laughable, and yet it is thoroughly humorous.  But take an instance which is entirely comic:—­“All ye blackguards as isn’t lawyers,” exclaimed a crier, “quit the Coort.”  Or this:—­“Och, Counsellor, darling,” said a peasant once to O’Connell, “I’ve no way here to show your Honor my gratitude! but I wish I saw you knocked down in my own parish, and may be I wouldn’t bring a faction to the rescue.”  A similar instance occurred in this country.  An enthusiastic Irishwoman, listening once to a lecturer praising Ireland, exclaimed,—­“I wish to God I saw that man in poverty, that I might do something to relieve him.”

We shall now cite an example of pure wit.

“How can you defend this item, Mr. Curran,” said Lord Chancellor Clare,—­“’To writing innumerable letters, L100’?”

“Why, my Lord,” said Curran, “nothing can be more reasonable. It is not a penny a letter.”

But we might fill the whole space of our article, ay, or of twenty articles, with such illustrations; we will content ourselves with two others.  The idea is the same in both; but in the first it seems to have a mixture of the witty and the humorous; in the second, it belongs entirely to the humorous.

A lady at a dinner-party passing near where Talleyrand was standing, he looked up and significantly exclaimed, “Ah!” In the course of the dinner, the lady having asked him across the table, why on her entrance he said “Oh!” Talleyrand, with a grave, self-vindicatory look, answered,—­“Madame, je n’ai pas dit ‘Oh!’ J’ai dit ‘Ah!’”

Here is the second.—­The Reverend Alonzo Fizzle had preached his farewell-sermon to his disconsolate people in Drowsytown.  The next morning, Monday, he was strolling musingly along a silent road among the melancholy woods.  The pastor of a neighboring flock, the Reverend Darius Dizzle, was driving by in his modest one-horse chaise.

“Take a seat, Fizzle?” said he.  “Don’t care if I do,” said Fizzle,—­and took it.

“Why, the mischief, Fizzle,” said Dizzle, “did you say in your farewell-sermon, that it was just as well to preach to the dead buried six feet under the earth as to the people of Drowsytown?”

"I?—­I?—­I?" gasped the astonished Fizzle.  “A more alive and wakeful people are not upon the earth than the citizens of Drowsytown.  What calumniator has thus outraged them and me?  Who told you this? Who dared to say it?”