“Like the arch fiend, he assumes many shapes.  He is now a tall man, and again a short man; sometimes young and audacious, sometimes old and leering.  He only once took a feminine guise:  that blessed form was irksome to him.  He prefers the freedom of masculinity and ineffables.  He was once a bookkeeper like myself; then a young attorney; then a medical student; then a bald-headed old gentleman, who seemed to blow a flageolet for a living; and lately, he has taken the shape of a well-to-do President of ’The Arkansas and Arizona Sky Rocket Transportation Company,’ but through all these shifting shapes, I recognize him and shudder.

“He is known as the Funny Fellow.

“Very glorious are wit and humor.  I have heard many eminent lecturers discourse on the distinctions, definitions, and value of these airy good gifts.  I remember being especially edified by the skill with which Spout, the eloquent, dissected the philosophy of mirth in the same style and with the same effect that the boy in the story dissected his grandmamma’s bellows to see how the wind was raised.  I agree with Spout that wit and humor are glorious; that satire, pricking the balloons of conceit, vain glory, and hypocrisy, is invaluable; that a good laugh can come only from a warm heart; that the man in motley is often wiser than the judge in ermine or the priest in lawn.  These qualities are goodly in literature.  We all love the kindly humorist from Chaucer to Holmes, inclusive.  How genial and gentle they are, as they sit with us around the fireside, chucking us under the chins, and slyly poking us in the ribs; and in the field how nobly they have charged upon humbugs and shams.  They have been true knights, chivalrous, kind-hearted, brave, religious; their spears are slender, perhaps, yet sharp and elastic as the blades of Toledo; and as they have galloped up and down in the lists, gaily caparisoned and cheery, it has done our hearts good to see how they have hurled into the dust the pompous, sleepy champions of error and hypocrisy.

“So too, consider how pleasant a thing is mirth on the stage.  Who does not thank William the Great for Falstaff, and Hackett for his personation of the fat knight?  Who does not chuckle over the humors of Autolycus, rogue and peddler?  Who has not felt his eye glisten, as his lips smiled, when Jesse Rural has spoken, and who will not say to Ollapod, ‘Thank you, good sir, I owe you one’?

“Ah me! how I used to read those jolly unctuous authors when I was young, in the old ‘sitting-room’ at home!  The great fire-place glows before me now; its light dances on the wall; my mother’s hand is on my head; my sister’s eyes are beaming on her lover over in the darker corner; there is a murmur of pleasant voices; there are quiet mirth and deep joy.  I lose myself in revery when I think of these pleasures, and almost forget the Funny Fellow.