Men of one idea,—­that is, who have one idea at a time,—­men who accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be great and noble, they are impervious to it.  But through the perversity of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a single idea, and that a small and rickety one—­some seven months’ child of thought—­that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to the disquieting of a whole neighborhood.  These last commonly need no satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions.  For example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, “that one John Robins was the last great antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in Thessalonians”?  I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm, the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm likewise were due to the same cause.  Hearing him discourse, you would have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an epigram which made it instantly ludicrous.  “I consider myself,” exclaimed he, “personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth’s axis.”  A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting.  “I have had,” he said, “Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before.”  Could the fanaticism of the collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?

I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of the comic.  There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without laughing (perhaps on Cicero’s principle of the haruspex haruspicem) and feeling inclined to say, “My good fellow, if you will keep my secret I will keep yours.”  In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body and soul.  But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm would lead us an endless dance.