make up what is called “the world” are fond of wit.  It rather puts them out, as Nature did Fuseli:  They look on its crinkling play as men do at lightning; and while they grant it is very fine, are teased with an uncomfortable wonder as to where it is going to strike next.  They would rather, on the whole, it were farther off.  They like well-established jokes, the fine old smoked-herring sort, such as the clown offers them in the circus, warranted never to spoil, if only kept dry enough.  Your fresh wit demands a little thought, perhaps, or at least a kind of negative wit, in the recipient.  It is an active, meddlesome—­quality, forever putting things in unexpected and somewhat startling relations to each other; and such new relations are as unwelcome to the ordinary mind as poor relations to a nouveau riche.  Who wants to be all the time painfully conceiving of the antipodes walking like flies on the ceiling?  Yet wit is related to some of the profoundest qualities of the intellect.  It is the reasoning faculty acting per saltum, the sense of analogy brought to a focus; it is generalization in a flash, logic by the electric telegraph, the sense of likeness in unlikeness, that lies at the root of all discoveries; it is the prose imagination, common-sense at fourth proof.  All this is no reason why the world should like it, however; and we fancy that the Question, Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? was plaintively put in the primitive tongue by one of the world’s gray fathers to another without producing the slightest conviction.  Of course, there must be some reason for this suspicion of wit, as there is for most of the world’s deep-rooted prejudices.  There is a kind of surface-wit that is commonly the sign of a light and shallow nature.  It becomes habitual persiflage, incapable of taking a deliberate and serious view of anything, or of conceiving the solemnities that environ life.  This has made men distrustful of all laughers; and they are apt to confound in one sweeping condemnation with this that humor whose base is seriousness, and which is generally the rebound of the mind from over-sad contemplation.  They do not see that the same qualities that make Shakspeare the greatest of tragic poets make him also the deepest of humorists.

Dr. Holmes was already an author of more than a quarter of a century’s standing, and was looked on by most people as an amusing writer merely.  He protested playfully and pointedly against this, once or twice; but, as he could not help being witty, whether he would or no, his audience laughed and took the protest as part of the joke.  He felt that he was worth a great deal more than he was vulgarly rated at, and perhaps chafed a little; but his opportunity had not come.  With the first number of the “Atlantic” it came at last, and wonderfully he profited by it.  The public were first delighted, and then astonished.  So much wit, wisdom, pathos, and universal Catharine-wheeling