It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the ridiculous.  People laugh with him just so long as he amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh at him.  There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear.  Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses?  Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight?  Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!—­first-rate performance!—­and all the rest of the fine phrases.  But if all at once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,—­ah, that wasn’t in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith—­who, as everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every inch of him—­ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty.  The “Quarterly,” “so savage and tartarly,” came down upon him in the most contemptuous style, as “a joker of jokes,” a “diner-out of the first water,” in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even.—­If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid qualities.  And so to an actor:  Hamlet first, and Bob Logic afterwards, if you like; but don’t think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do anything great with Macbeth’s dagger after flourishing about with Paul Pry’s umbrella.  Do you know, too, that the majority of men look upon all who challenge their attention,—­for a while, at least,—­as beggars, and nuisances?  They always try to get off as cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man—­pardon the forlorn pleasantry!—­is the funny-bone.  That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

—­Oh, indeed, no!—­I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally.  I think I could read you something I have in my desk which would probably make you smile.  Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now.  The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes