as a true one.  This vast power of his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often wanting in proportion and in discretion.  Humourists touching upon History or Society are given to be capricious.  They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings are primary, as with singers.  Comedy, on the other hand, is an interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity kept in restraint.  The French lay marked stress on mesure et gout, and they own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple justness and taste.  We can teach them many things; they can teach us in this.

The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the society he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men’s intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upon their characters.  He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or surroundings, but with what you are now weaving.  To understand his work and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities.  The aim and business of the Comic poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile to sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter.  Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it in life.  Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men ridiculous.  But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.  Caleb Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character.  In the case of ‘poor relatives,’ on the other hand, it is the rich, whom they perplex, that are really comic; and to laugh at the former, not seeing the comedy of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision.  Humourist and Satirist frequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, to the exclusion of the Comic.  That was an affecting moment in the history of the Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears at a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell’s on the cut of his coat.  Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey.  The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it.  Put into action, it would be farcical.  It is too gross for Comedy.

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead of our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the Comic idea.  But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect.  Most of doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea of Comedy.

The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face.  The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile; often no more than a smile.  It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.