No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers.  They abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using humouristic phrase:  the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to treat of the infinitely little.  And it really may be humorous, of a kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced age.  He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to the period of his death.  There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he was a man of profound egoism.  Hence an argument arose, and was warmly sustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world of troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband their strength for the sake of living on.  Can it be possible, the argument ran, for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of a hundred?  Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him to the oak of the forest—­a venerable comparison.

The argument was conducted on both sides with spirit and earnestness, lightened here and there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic playful, reminding one of the serious pursuit of their fun by truant boys, that are assured they are out of the eye of their master, and now and then indulge in an imitation of him.  And well might it be supposed that the Comic idea was asleep, not overlooking them!  It resolved at last to this, that either Duke Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity in clinging to life so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a resistance to the enemy.  As one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth is glad to get out again at the entrance, the argument ran about to conclude with its commencement.

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and particularly the argument on it.  Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of the centenarian, with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubborn vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question for contention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should die, to the identical minute, that he may preserve the respect of his fellows, followed by a systematic attempt to make an accurate measurement in parallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party, and a string of yawns by the other, of the veteran’s power of enduring life, and our capacity for enduring him, with tremendous pulling on both sides.

Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the disputants like very lightning?  There are questions, as well as persons, that only the Comic can fitly touch.