approach nonsense, and
often contains useful instruction.

Holms exhibits the nature of humour in a passage remarkable for
philosophy and elegance:

"There is a perfect consciousness in every kind of wit that its
essence consists in a partial and incomplete view of whatever it
touches. It throws a single ray separated from the rest, red,
yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade upon an object, never white
light. We get beautiful effects from wit, all the prismatic
colours, but never the object is in fair daylight. Poetry uses the
rainbow tints for special effects, but always its essential object
is the purest white light of truth."

Bacon went further, and considered that even the beauty of poetry and
the pleasures of imagination were derived from falsehood.

"This truth is a naked and open daylight, which doth not show the
masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and
daintily as candle light. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a
pearl that showeth well by day, but it will not rise to the price
of a diamond or carbuncle that shineth best in varied lights. A
mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if
there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering
hopes, false valuations, imagination, and the like, but that it
would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things full
of melancholy indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves."

Mr. Dallas goes so far as to say that "it is impossible that laughter
should be an unmixed pleasure, seeing it arises from some aspect of
imperfection or discordance." The fact that many people would undergo
almost any kind of suffering rather than be exposed to ridicule,
indicates that it contains some very unpleasant reflection. We sometimes
feel uncomfortable even when we hear laughter around us, the cause of
which we do not know, fearing that we may be ourselves the object of
it--even dogs dislike to be laughed at. Our ordinary modes of speech
seem to point to some imperfection or error in humour, as when we say
"there is many a true word spoken in jest," or "life is a jest,"
signifying its unreality. Sometimes we say that an observation "must be
a joke," implying that it is false. I have even heard of a man who never
laughed at humour because he hated falsehood, and we sometimes say of an
untrue statement that it must be taken