nal. Both types are abundantly illustrated in English
and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain
rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with
shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that
both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and
American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never
weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced
to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane
school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they
soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of
writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience,
and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the
Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote
simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and
Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they
addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being
misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All
readers of Latin were like members of one club. Of course membership
was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being
content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with
the advice to try for the "little public"?

The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or
in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned
Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the
persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of the
_Spectator_, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire
of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand
copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of
Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable
concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver
Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience
of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular
as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.

But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while
outside the Harvard gates. These two publics for the humorist we may
call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer