The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy in his laughter.

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our description:  the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under the gorgeous robes of ceremonial.  Our souls must be on fire when we wear solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve.  Finite and infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night.  The comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable.  But ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness?  He will fly straight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero.  He will also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one.  This vast power of his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often wanting in proportion and in discretion.  Humourists touching upon History or Society are given to be capricious.  They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings are primary, as with singers.  Comedy, on the other hand, is an interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity kept in restraint.  The French lay marked stress on mesure et gout, and they own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple justness and taste.  We can teach them many things; they can teach us in this.

The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the society he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men’s intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upon their characters.  He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or surroundings, but with what you are now weaving.  To understand his work and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities.  The aim and business of the Comic poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile to sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter.  Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it in life.  Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men ridiculous.  But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.  Caleb Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character.  In the case of ‘poor relatives,’ on the other hand, it is the rich, whom they perplex, that