Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.  With them, as Juvenal said of himself, “facit indignatio versus,” and wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.  Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a place “ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat,” and this hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor.  There is certainly humor in “Gulliver,” especially in the chapters about the Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape.  But commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him rather by what he wrote than by what he was.  Take this for an example from the “Day of Judgment”: 

  With a whirl of thought oppressed
  I sank from reverie to rest,
  A horrid vision seized my head,
  I saw the graves give up their dead! 
  Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
  And thunder roars, and lightning flies! 
  Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
  The world stands trembling at his throne! 
  While each pale sinner hung his head,
  Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said: 
  “Offending race of human kind;
  By nature, reason, learning, blind,
  You who through frailty stepped aside. 
  And you who never fell through pride,
  You who in different sects were shammed,
  And come to see each other damned
  (So some folks told you—­but they knew
  No more of Jove’s designs than you)—­
  The world’s mad business now is o’er,
  And I resent these pranks no more—­
  I to such blockheads set my wit! 
  I damn such fools!  Go, go! you’re bit!”

The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn preface, is entirely of the essence of wit.  So, too, is the sudden flirt of the scorpion’s tail to sting you.  It is almost the opposite of humor in one respect—­namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor delights in exposing.  This further difference is also true:  that wit makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller the oftener we read it.  If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid.  We should never forget that he died mad.  Satirists of this kind, while they have this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower, differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always to the disadvantage of the higher.  They purposely disenchant us—­while the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at all.

Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose “Discoveries,” as he calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain, says: