demonstrate their foolishness.  Moliere was contented to revenge himself on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies in criticism.  A perception of the comic spirit gives high fellowship.  You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane.  Look there for your unchallengeable upper class!  You feel that you are one of this our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and would not if you could.  Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly moderated.  Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds of imagination or of devotion.  The Comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic.  Chaucer bubbles with it:  Shakespeare overflows:  there is a mild moon’s ray of it (pale with super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus.  Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper.  It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office:  and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp:  as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere:  at which the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the worshipful may be in alliance:  I know not how far comic, or how much assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its appearance:  at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.  Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that it enlivens.  It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one of the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring daylight.  You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take it in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food.  That which you give out—­the joyful roar—­is not the better part; let that go to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs.  Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year.  The boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions.  Such treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert.  Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a step in civilization.  To shrink from being an object of it is a step in cultivation.  We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter