tinually from innocent, much less from wholesome and useful
pleasure, such as human life doth need or require. And if jocular
discourse may serve to good purposes of this kind; if it may be apt
to raise our drooping spirits, to allay our irksome cares, to whet
our blunted industry, to recreate our minds being tired and cloyed
with graver occupations; if it may breed alacrity, or maintain good
humour among us; if it may conduce to sweeten conversation and
endear society; then is it not inconvenient, or unprofitable. If
for those ends we may use other recreations, employing on them our
ears and eyes, our hands and feet, our other instruments of sense
and motion, why may we not as well to them accommodate our organs of
speech and interior sense? Why should those games which excite our
wits and fancies be less reasonable than those whereby our grosser
parts and faculties are exercised? Yea, why are not those more
reasonable, since they are performed in a manly way, and have in
them a smack of reason; feeling also they may be so managed, as not
only to divert and please, but to improve and profit the mind,
rousing and quickening it, yea sometimes enlightening and
instructing it, by good sense conveyed in jocular expression?

It would surely be hard that we should be tied ever to knit the
brow, and squeeze the brain (to be always sadly dumpish, or
seriously pensive), that all divertisement of mirth and pleasantness
should be shut out of conversation; and how can we better relieve
our minds, or relax our thoughts, how can we be more ingenuously
cheerful, in what more kindly way can we exhilarate ourselves and
others, than by thus sacrificing to the Graces, as the ancients
called it? Are not some persons always, and all persons sometimes,
incapable otherwise to divert themselves, than by such discourse?
Shall we, I say, have no recreation? or must our recreations be ever
clownish, or childish, consisting merely in rustical efforts, or in
petty sleights of bodily strength and activity? Were we, in fine,
obliged ever to talk like philosophers, assigning dry reasons for
everything, and dropping grave sentences upon all occasions, would
it not much deaden human life, and make ordinary conversation
exceedingly to languish? Facetiousness therefore in such cases, and
to such purposes, may be allowable.

2. Facetiousness is allowable when it is the most proper instrument
of exposing things