of becoming the hero of this proud and interesting situation to know exactly what a joke is. Joke (Latinè, jocus) is a piece of pleasantry, a sally, a jest which, to be perfect in all its parts, should have a point (Latinè, punctus), as a mouse has a tail. It happens that some mice have no tails, and it happens that some jokes have no points. If the statistics of the twenty-one million extant jokes could be accurately tabulated, it might result that a small per-centage would have to be discounted for jokes in this predicament. About one emerald in five hundred bears the test of the microscope; about one bull (Latinè, taurus jocosus) in fifty thousand proves to have a tail.

There are subtle likenesses in things apparently unlike. As an expert in precious stones says to a man, handing him back in perfectly cold blood his beautiful diamond, "That is the best paste I ever saw," so an assayer of modern facetiæ returns your joke, with "Clever, but in Lucian;" or, "Hierocles was before you!" or, "Very well put ; but how capitally Erasmus brings that in, in such and such a place." He will get you into a corner somewhere. He has the whole matter at his fingers' ends. He knows every joke that was ever made, who made it, why he made it, and how many have made it since.

The fathers of typography were probably the worst enemies that the disciples of the joking craft ever had to encounter. The invention of printing

was positively a very gross inconvenience. Anybody who did not happen to have been born, forsooth, in the fifth century, and who made a joke, was henceforward to be branded as a borrower, because Lucian had got it in his "Hetaire," or Athenæus in his "Deipnosophista "—as if it were likely that every one could be born at once, and start even! MSS. have a fortunate tendency to turn to mould, but with printed books it is different; they keep on multiplying out of all reason, and thrust themselves before people's eyes in a way that leaves no chance for men coming (by no fault of their own) after Erasmus and the rest of them. Printing was precisely the kind of thing which, when it had once started, there was no keeping within decent limits. We can bring to mind but one consolation. Some day this very press may take in hand those venerable Irish manuscripts (if they are happily preserved), the origin of which is lost in antiquity, and of which it is alleged by (Irish) scholars that Hierocles had the use. The history of the matter seems to be that these unprinted treasures, compiled in what was at that time the only spoken language, have been sealed up for centuries somewhere; but their publication will establish the fact, doubtless, that they are the longlost originals from which the Chinese and other more modern nations have been borrowing without the least acknowledgment. The circumstantial testimony in favour of this supposition is regarded

with a perfectly satisfactory result, glean the good sayings of others.

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it." A punster or a wit may not be, and probably is not, the best judge of puns or of wit. It is better that the gatherer of these things should stand on neutral ground, and not be one of the cloth; and besides, there is the danger that he may smuggle in too many of his own pleasantries, and print only other men's second best by way of a foil. The present collection, exclusively of a considerable body of matter which will be found to be new to the general reader, embraces the best portion of nearly thirty jest books, which have been specially examined for the purpose, and of which the contents were believed to be in many instances little known, except to those who have made this branch of literature their particular study. It has often happened also that the Editor, by comparing different texts (so to speak) of the same story or joke, has been enabled to give a better and more accurate version than that commonly accepted. There is no cause, after all, why a performance of this

class, second-rate or third-rate as its literary importance and value may be held to be, should not have the benefit of all the care and reading which may be at the editor's command; and many excellent anecdotes are completely marred, as they pass current, by some misprint or error of transcript, allowed to stand in impression after impression, and copied from one book into another. That the volume now offered to the public will prove absolutely free from such blemishes, it would be futile even to trust; but an unusual degree of care has been observed in the hope of reducing them to a minimum.

It may be pointed out that many of the anecdotes which are extant, purporting to represent incidents of a humorous character in the lives of distinguished persons, are, in an historical sense, totally unworthy of credit, and mainly, if not altogether, apocryphal. The stories related of Ben Jonson, and (coming nearer to our own time) Sheridan and the elder Mathews, are in many cases certainly, and in others very probably, nothing but fabrications for the nonce. A great portion of the plea

santries and witticisms reported of Jonson do not seem to be of higher antiquity than the middle of the last century, while some of the good things imputed to Sheridan and Mathews occur in compilations published two hundred and fifty years ago. One or two of Sydney Smith's jests I have found in a book printed almost before he was born; and the well-known "Bill Stumps's" hoax in Dickens's "Pickwick" was forestalled in the "School for Wits," 1813, where a similar piece of deception is recorded. The joke in the Spectator about Mr Finis, which has its counterpart in the French valet's profound mystification at the literary fecundity of Monsieur Tome, is traceable back at least to 1639; and the tale of the scholar who could prove by sophistry that two eggs were three, after appearing for the first time in a jest book of 1526, were transplanted into the "Jests of Scogin," and was told of this person and the other till it is altered to suit Charles II., Nell Gwynne, and the Duchess of Portsmouth, in a facetious publication of the time of the Second George.

The task of Editorship has not, perhaps, in the