fect Sympathies.' I should make him read them to himself, while I
sat by and watched. If his countenance never relaxed, as if he were
inwardly saying, 'That's so,' I should withhold the certificate. I
should not consider him a fit person to have charge of innocent youth."
We can readily see from this extract that we need not go back to the
early part of the last century to find material for our test of this
sovereign quality, a sense of humor. Mr. Crothers himself, the Charles
Lamb of our American Letters to-day, shall furnish our subject-matter.
Bring your _Gentle Reader_, or _The Pardoner's Wallet_, or the essays
collected with the _Christmas Sermon_, to class to-morrow. If these
volumes are not in your personal library, your library is sadly lacking.
Read "The Honorable Points of Ignorance," "How to Know the Fallacies,"
or "Conscience Concerning Witchcraft." If any one of these fails to
disclose in you the mental alertness and power of discrimination which
their author considers to be requisite characteristics of a true sense
of humor, then _you_ are sadly lacking in that coveted quality of mind
and heart, and it behooves us to make an attempt to supply these
deficiencies.

Can a sense of humor be cultivated, and if it can be cultivated, is it
safe to do so? some one asks--some one who has suffered at the hands of
a clever jester perhaps. By way of arriving at an answer, let us
examine a little further the category of qualities which Mr. Crothers
considers requisite to true humor.

We have already noted mental alertness and power of discrimination.
There can be no question as to the desirability or feasibility of
developing these characteristics, since such development belongs to the
fundamental effort of education. But these are but two characteristics
of the quality we are considering, and not the distinguishing ones.
"Humor," continues the category, "is the frank enjoyment of the
imperfect." Now we scent a danger! For if, as Mr. Crothers admits,
"artistic sensibility finds satisfaction only in the perfect," and
since, as we all admit, artistic sensibility is an end in education
devoutly to be desired, then is not a cultivation of the "frank
enjoyment of the imperfect," oh dear and gentle humorist, a dangerous
indulgence? The conclusive answer comes: "One may have learned to enjoy
the sublime, the beautiful, the useful, the orderly, but he has missed
something if he has not also learned to enjoy the incongruous, t