To attempt a precise and final distinction between these two last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else would be no very hopeful task, perhaps; but those who have a keen perception of either find no great difficulty in discriminating, as a matter of feeling, between the two.  And what is true of the qualities themselves is true, mutatis mutandis, of the men by whom they have been most conspicuously displayed.  Some wits have been humourists also; nearly all humourists have been also wits; yet the two fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world’s literature belongs.  Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle:  widely as these writers differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all is a catalogue of humourists.  And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, Pope, Sheridan, Courier, Sydney Smith—­this, I suppose, would be recognized at once as an enumeration of wits.  Some of these humourists, like Fielding, like Richter, like Carlyle, are always, or almost always, humourists alone.  Some of these wits, like Pascal, like Pope, like Courier, are wits with no, or but slight, admixture of humour; and in the classification of these there is of course no difficulty at all.  But even with the wits who very often give us humour also, and with the humourists who as often delight us with their wit, we seldom find ourselves in any doubt as to the real and more essential affinities of each.  It is not by the wit which he has infused into his talk, so much as by the humour with which he has delineated the character, that Shakspeare has given his Falstaff an abiding place in our memories.  It is not the repartees of Benedick and Beatrice, but the immortal fatuity of Dogberry, that the name of Much Ado About Nothing recalls.  None of the verbal quips of Touchstone tickle us like his exquisite patronage of William and the fascination which he exercises over the melancholy Jaques.  And it is the same throughout all Shakspeare.  It is of the humours of Bottom, and Launce, and Shallow, and Sly, and Aguecheek; it is of the laughter that treads upon the heels of horror and pity and awe, as we listen to the Porter in Macbeth, to the Grave-digger in Hamlet, to the Fool in Lear—­it is of these that we think when we think of Shakspeare in any other but his purely poetic mood.  Whenever, that is to say, we think of him as anything but a poet, we think of him, not as a wit, but as a humourist.  So, too, it is not the dagger-thrusts of the Drapier’s Letters, but the broad ridicule of the Voyage to Laputa, the savage irony of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, that we associate with the name of Swift.  And, conversely, it is the cold, epigrammatic glitter of Congreve’s dialogue, the fizz and crackle of the fireworks which Sheridan serves out with undiscriminating hand to the most insignificant of his characters—­it is this which stamps the work of these dramatists with characteristics far more marked than any which belong to them in right of humorous portraiture of human foibles or ingenious invention of comic incident.