The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a sense of the distinction.  You will fancy you have changed your habitation to a planet remoter from the sun.  You may be among powerful brains too.  You will not find poets—­or but a stray one, over-worshipped.  You will find learned men undoubtedly, professors, reputed philosophers, and illustrious dilettanti.  They have in them, perhaps, every element composing light, except the Comic.  They read verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not under that vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present, which we have taken note of.  They build a temple of arrogance; they speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip in grossness, is usually a form of pugnacity.

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of the eye that should look inward.  They have never weighed themselves in the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritable personality.  A very learned English professor crushed an argument in a political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily:  ’Are you aware, sir, that I am a philologer?’

The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it:  he is at least a fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse.  But the society named polite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting a bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist:  ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil.  It is besides addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and preserve a notion of identity.  The professor is better out of a circle that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, and always confuses.  The school that teaches gently what peril there is lest a cultivated head should still be coxcomb’s, and the collisions which may befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended than the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with material.

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops of matter.  The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism.  An Englishman paid a visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took so cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon.  The first professor, an erudite