the queerness or singularity of the imagery they employ. When Curran fought his duel with Judge Egan, the latter, who was a big man, directed the attention of the second to the advantage which, in this respect, his adversary had over him: 'He may hit me as easily as he would a haystack, and I might as well be aiming at the edge of a knife as at his lean carcass.' 'Well,' said Curran, 'let the gentleman chalk the size of my body on your side, and let every ball hitting outside of that go for nothing.'

Speaking of having been shampooed at Mahommed's Baths at Brighton, Sidney Smith said, 'They squeezed enough out of me to make a lean curate.' To the Bishop of New Zealand, just before his departure for that cannibal diocese, he said: 'A bishop should be given to hospitality, and never be without a smoked little boy in the bacon-rack and a cold missionary on the sideboard.'

A witticism's prosperity-Shakespeare to the contraryoften lies not only 'in the tongue of him who makes it,' but in his manner of speaking it, and in the occasion which brings it forth. Novelty, too, is an essential ingredient. Therefore it will seldom bear transplantation, and suffers by repetition. Nothing, it has been written, is so dreary as a jest-book. The choicer wines lose their flavor by exposure.

But the dreariness of perpetual and sustained wit is fundamental. To be incessantly surprised is to be soon wearied, and finally disgusted. Hudibras is saved from tediousness by being read in small quantities. 'Wit is the god of moments,' says Bruyère. Butler apparently so conceives its limitations, in these lines:

We grant although he had much wit,

He was very shy of using it,
As being loth to wear it out;
And therefore bore it not about,
Unless on holidays, or so,

As men their best apparel do

In composition and in conversation, wit should be but an occasional accompaniment. As to the first, to divert and interrupt the train of thought too much is to lose the interest and attention due to the cardinal point. As for the second, wit should be the seasoning, not the food. Usually none are so feared and hated as habitual wits, and there are no greater bores than persistent punsters.

While mirth may be secured at the cost of conviction, indulgence increases demand, and the flattered wit who constantly exhibits his power is liable to degenerate into a buffoon. Corwin was fearful that he would be remembered only as a clown. As a habit, indeed, wit is necessarily inimical to the nobler faculties. The tendency to mark and treasure trivial connections in things diverse and remote cannot become predominant without detriment to the higher, reflective power, which, neglecting relations that are distant and fanciful, adheres to what are substantial and permanent. Memory and wit,' says Lord Kames, 'are often conjoined: solid judgment seldom with either.' This principle, which does not deny that the cultivated and great may be witty, probably suggests Hazlitt's observation: Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.'

A perilous possession, but still a precious one, whether we consider it as an instrument of correction and reform, an aid to discourse, or a means of relaxation and cheer. Says Sidney Smith, himself one of the keenest of wits:

I have talked of the danger of wit. I do not mean by that to enter into commonplace declamation against faculties because they are dangerous; wit is dangerous, eloquence is dangerous, a talent for observation is dangerous, everything is dangerous that has efficacy and vigor for its characteristics; nothing is safe but mediocrity. The business is, in conducting the understanding well, to risk something; to aim at uniting things that are commonly incompatible. The meaning of an extraordinary man is, that he is eight

men, not one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined. But when wit is combined with sense and information; when it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principles; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty and something much better than witty, who loves honor, justice, decency, good nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit; wit is then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature.

There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects of wit upon the different characters of men; than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness, teaching age and care and pain to smile, extorting reluctant gleams of pleasure from melancholy, and charming even the pangs of grief. It is pleasant to observe how it penetrates through the coldness and awkwardness of society, gradually bringing men nearer together, and like the combined force of wine and oil, gives every man a glad heart and a shining countenance. Genuine and innocent wit like this is surely the flavor of the mind! Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit and flavor and brightness and laughter and perfumes to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to 'charm his pained steps over the burning marl.'

Let us now look for the characteristics of humor:

My friend, Sir Roger, being a good Churchman, has beautified the inside of his church with several texts of his own choosing; he has likewise given a handsome pulpit-cloth, and railed in the communion-table at his own expense. He has often told me that at his coming to his estate he found his parishioners very irregular; and that in order to make them kneel and join in the responses, he gave every one of them a hassock and a common-prayer book, and at the same time employing an itinerant singing-master, who goes about the country for that purpose, to instruct them rightly in the tunes of the psalms-upon which they now very much value themselves, and indeed out-do most of the country churches that I have heard. As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; for if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him, and if

he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or sends his servants to them. Several other of the knight's particularities break out upon these occasions—sometimes he will be lengthening out a verse in the singing psalms, half a minute after the rest of the congregation have done with it; sometimes when he is pleased with the matter of his devotion, he pronounces Amen three or four times to the same prayer, and sometimes stands up when everybody else is upon their knees, to count the congregation, or see if any of his tenants are missing.-Addison.

Our next selection is from Fielding's Tom Jones. Partridge, half barber, half schoolmaster, goes to the theatre, as Tom's attendant, to witness the performance of Hamlet:

At the end of the play Jones asked him which of the players he had liked best. To this he answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question: "The king without doubt.' 'Indeed, Mr. Partridge,' said Mrs. Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the town: for they are all agreed that Hamlet is acted by the best player who ever was on the stage.' 'He the best player!' cried Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me! any man—that is, any good man - that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but, indeed, madam, though I was never at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country; and the king for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the others. Anybody may see he is an actor.'

The following is from Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the hero of which is a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, whose business is to instruct the children of his enchanted region:

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like

a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield. . . . In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him, on Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above all the rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill-pond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. . . . He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. And then as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill-side; the boding cry of the treetoad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token. His only resource, on such occasions, either to drown thought, or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes;-and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe, at hear