The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the English, and next to them the Spanish—­both inclined to gravity.  Let us not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest satisfaction in the farce.  It is a mark of sanity.  Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the impressions received through the imagination.  Richter, himself, a great humorist, defines it thus: 

Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it beside the great—­that it may annihilate both, because in the presence of the infinite all are alike nothing.  Only the universal, only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality, the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the Scoffer.

We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor, while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of lightning, and as sudden.  Humor may pervade a whole page without our being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, “It is here.”  Wit must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing.  When the wise deacon shook his head, and said that “there was a good deal of human natur’ in man,” he might have added that there was a good deal more in some men than in others.  Those who have the largest share of it may be humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence of mind, and a happy faculty of expression.  This perfection of phrase, this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic.  As Galiani said of Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes every time.  And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase:  “It is the art of saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where it is forbidden to say anything.”  Wit must also have the quality of unexpectedness.  “Sometimes,” says Barrow, “an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being.  Sometimes it rises only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty wresting of obvious matter to the purpose.  Often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how.  Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language.”