daylight.  You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take it in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food.  That which you give out—­the joyful roar—­is not the better part; let that go to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs.  Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year.  The boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions.  Such treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert.  Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a step in civilization.  To shrink from being an object of it is a step in cultivation.  We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power of laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere.  Embrace them both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast.  Nothing in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike OEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under the obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow—­the god’s iou—­iou being the lustier—­means only the stopping of a sneeze, or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an invocation to some deity:  and the slave contrives that the god shall get the bigger lot of blows.  Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter.  But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind.  Moliere’s laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as colour to our thoughts.  The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit.  They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clear interpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all.  Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere’s delicacy.