Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and carried on too ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the attack.  She has time to get behind entrenchments.  She is ready to stand a siege, before the heavily armed man of science and the writer of the leading article or elaborate essay have primed their big guns.  It should be remembered that she has charms for the multitude; and an English multitude seeing her make a gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, certainly willing to lend her a cheer.  Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hire her own man of science, her own organ in the Press.  If ultimately she is cast out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks.  She can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants.  We learn rather gloomily, after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our midst able men and men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual navigation.  Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the poison of delusion while Folly is passing from the state of vapour to substantial form.

O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Moliere!  These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when you do call.  You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a renovating air—­the South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.

No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers.  They abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using humouristic phrase:  the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to treat of the infinitely little.  And it really may be humorous, of a kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced age.  He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to the period of his death.  There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he was a man of profound egoism.  Hence an argument arose, and was warmly sustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world of troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband their strength for the sake of living on.  Can it be possible, the argument ran, for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of a hundred?  Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him to the oak of the forest—­a venerable comparison.