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=_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 to us as a priceless bequest; push them not from the daily walks of the world’s life:  let them scatter some humanities in the sullen marts of business; let them glide in through the open doors of the heart; let their glee lighten up the feast, and gladden the fireside of home: 

  “That the night may be filled with music,
  And the cares that infest the day
  May fold their tents, like the Arabs,
  And as silently steal away.”

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=_Jane T.L.  Worthington,-1847._= (Manual, p. 524.)

From “Love Sketches.”