men are strong in their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who is after all our own offspring, to relieve the Book.  Comedy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great Book, the music of the Book.  They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair pan of a book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed in one comic sitting.

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page before us, if we would be men.  One, with an index on the Book, cries out, in a style pardonable to his fervency:  The remedy of your frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity.  Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in the companion throbs of your pulses.  Interrogate them.  They lump along like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clock pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic.  This too in spite of Bacchus.  And let them gallop; let them gallop with the God bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the same note.  Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of Amphitrite!  We hear a shout of war for a diversion.—­Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively.  She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us.  She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.  If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance.  You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest.  Do not offend reason.  A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap.  In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter:  an Ariel released by Prospero’s wand from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax.  And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty Spring deciding for Summer.  You hear it giving the delicate spirit his liberty.  Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society:  a low as of the udderful cow past milking hour!  O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing!—­So far an enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—­there is a touch of pathos.  The Egoist surely inspires pity.  He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person.  Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops.  There is the innovation.