such places, you may hear loud laughter, but--not see silent laughter,
not see strong men weak, helpless, suffering, gradually convalescent,
dangerously relapsing. Laughter at its greatest and best is not there.

To such laughter nothing is more propitious than an occasion that
demands gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the
surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds. If music halls were schoolrooms
for us, and the comedians were our schoolmasters, how much less talent
would be needed for giving us how much more joy! Even in private and
accidental intercourse, few are the men whose humour can reduce us, be
we never so susceptible, to paroxysms of mirth. I will wager that nine
tenths of the world's best laughter is laughter at, not with. And it is
the people set in authority over us that touch most surely our sense of
the ridiculous. Freedom is a good thing, but we lose through it golden
moments. The schoolmaster to his pupils, the monarch to his courtiers,
the editor to his staff--how priceless they are! Reverence is a good
thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more
sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that
is incongruous with his greatness. And herein lies one of the reasons
why as we grow older we laugh less. The men we esteemed so great are
gathered to their fathers. Some of our coevals may, for aught we know,
be very great, but good heavens! we can't esteem them so.

Of extreme laughter I know not in any annals a more satisfying example
than one that is to be found in Moore's Life of Byron. Both Byron and
Moore were already in high spirits when, on an evening in the spring of
1818, they went 'from some early assembly' to Mr. Rogers' house in St.
James's Place and were regaled there with an impromptu meal. But not
high spirits alone would have led the two young poets to such excess
of laughter as made the evening so very memorable. Luckily they both
venerated Rogers (strange as it may seem to us) as the greatest of
living poets. Luckily, too, Mr. Rogers was ever the kind of man,
the coldly and quietly suave kind of man, with whom you don't take
liberties, if you can help it--with whom, if you can't help it, to take
liberties is in itself a most exhilarating act. And he had just received
a presentation copy of Lord Thurloe's latest book, 'Poems on Several
Occasions.' The two young poets found in this elder's Muse much that
was so execrable