ows.
Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the
Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of
laughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the
mind. Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light
to our nature, as colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the
Tartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in the
comic spirit. They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of
the mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clear
interpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all.
Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh
of heart and mind in one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness,
something of Moliere's delicacy.

* * * * *

The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a
sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your
habitation to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among powerful
brains too. You will not find poets--or but a stray one,
over-worshipped. You will find learned men undoubtedly, professors,
reputed philosophers, and illustrious dilettanti. They have in them,
perhaps, every element composing light, except the Comic. They read
verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not under
that vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present,
which we have taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance; they
speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip in
grossness, is usually a form of pugnacity.

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of
the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in
the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the
rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritable
personality. A very learned English professor crushed an argument in a
political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily: 'Are you aware,
sir, that I am a philologer?'

The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the
professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become
their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at least a
fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society named
polite