_Carm._ 39 _in Egnat_.

Nothing so foolish as the laugh of fools.

Among all kinds of writing, there is none in which authors are more apt
to miscarry than in works of humour, as there is none in which they are
more ambitious to excel. It is not an imagination that teems with
monsters, a head that is filled with extravagant conceptions, which is
capable of furnishing the world with diversions of this nature; and yet,
if we look into the productions of several writers, who set up for men of
humour, what wild, irregular fancies, what unnatural distortions of
thought do we meet with? If they speak nonsense, they believe they are
talking humour; and when they have drawn together a scheme of absurd,
inconsistent ideas, they are not able to read it over to themselves
without laughing. These poor gentlemen endeavour to gain themselves the
reputation of wits and humorists, by such monstrous conceits as almost
qualify them for Bedlam; not considering that humour should always lie
under the check of reason, and that it requires the direction of the
nicest judgment, by so much the more as it indulges itself in the most
boundless freedoms. There is a kind of nature that is to be observed in
this sort of compositions, as well as in all other; and a certain
regularity of thought which must discover the writer to be a man of
sense, at the same time that he appears altogether given up to caprice.
For my part, when I read the delirious mirth of an unskilful author, I
cannot be so barbarous as to divert myself with it, but am rather apt to
pity the man, than to laugh at anything he writes.

The deceased Mr. Shadwell, who had himself a great deal of the talent
which I am treating of, represents an empty rake, in one of his plays, as
very much surprised to hear one say that breaking of windows was not
humour; and I question not but several English readers will be as much
startled to hear me affirm, that many of those raving, incoherent pieces,
which are often spread among us, under odd chimerical titles, are rather
the offsprings of a distempered brain than works of humour.

It is, indeed, much easier to describe what is not humour than what is;
and very difficult to define it otherwise than as Cowley has done wit, by
negatives. Were I to give my own notions of it, I would deliver them
after Plato's manner, in a kind of allegory, and, by supposing Humour to
be a person, deduce to him all his qualifications, according to the
fol