good
subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.

Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
faces, or before they have spoken a word.

The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
humorist, defines it thus:

Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
Scoffer.

We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and rou