him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be
some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in motion.

But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of
minors are vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading

man in a country constantly plunging into war under some plumed
Lamachus, with enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates

of London, and a Samuel Foote, of prodigiousgenius, attacking him
with ridicule, I think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in

by Aristophanes. This laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was
a Titanic pamphleteer, using laughter for his political weapon; a

laughter without scruple, the laughter of Hercules. He was primed
with wit, as with the garlic he speaks of giving to the game-cocks,

to make them fight the better. And he was a lyric poet of aerial
delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly national poet, and a poet

of such feeling that the comic mask is at times no broader than a
cloth on a face to show the serious features of our common likeness.

He is not to be revived; but if his method were studied, some of the
fire in him would come to us, and we might be revived.

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with
this primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by

the grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword.
They have the basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-

sense. They cordiallydislike the reverse of it. They have a rich
laugh, though it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros sel,

nor the polished Frenchman's mentally digestive laugh. And if they
have now, like a monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters

kicking the dictionary about, to let them reflect that they are
dull, occasionally, like the pensivemonarchsurprising himself with

an idea of an idea of his own, they look so. And they are given to
looking in the glass. They must see that something ails them. How

much even the better order of them will endure, without a thought of
the defensive, when the person afflicting them is protected from

satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly
tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception shuffled the guests

and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact estimate of the
strength of each one printed on them: and still this house

continued to be the most popular in England; nor did the lady ever
appear in print or on the boards as the comic type that she was.

It has been suggested that they have not yet spiritually
comprehended the signification of living in society; for who are

cheerfuller, brisker of wit, in the fields, and as explorers,
colonisers, backwoodsmen? They are happy in rough exercise, and

also in complete repose. The intermediate condition, when they are
called upon to talk to one another, upon other than affairs of

business or their hobbies, reveals them wearing a curious look of
vacancy, as it were the socket of an eye wanting. The Comic is

perpetually springing up in social life, and, it oppresses them from
not being perceived.

Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, who happens to have
enrolled himself in a Burial Company, politely entreats the others

to inscribe their names as shareholders, expatiating on the
advantages accruing to them in the event of their very possible

speedy death, the salubrity of the site, the aptitude of the soil
for a quick consumption of their remains, etc.; and they drink

sadness from the incongruous man, and conceive indigestion, not
seeing him in a sharply defined light, that would bid them taste the

comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newly elected member of our
Parliament celebrates his arrival at eminence by the publication of

a book on cab-fares, dedicated to a belovedfemale relative
deceased, and the comment on it is the word 'Indeed.' But, merely

for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon scene of yesterday in the
hunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, having broken his

collar-bone, trots away very soon after, against medical interdict,
half put together in splinters, to the most distant meet of his

neighbourhood, sure of escaping his doctor, who is the first person
he encounters. 'I came here purposely to avoid you,' says the

patient. 'I came here purposely to take care of you,' says the
doctor. Off they go, and come to a swollen brook. The patient

clears it handsomely: the doctor tumbles in. All the field are
alive with the heartiest relish of every incident and every cross-

light on it; and dull would the man have been thought who had not
his word to say about it when riding home.

In our prose literature we have had delightful Comic writers.
Besides Fielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and

Mr. Elton might walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged
for them. Galt's neglected novels have some characters and strokes

of shrewdcomedy. In our poeticliterature the comic is delicate
and graceful above the touch of Italian and French. Generally,

however, the English elect excel in satire, and they are noble
humourists. The national disposition is for hard-hitting, with a

moral purpose to sanction it; or for a rosy, sometimes a larmoyant,
geniality, not unmanly in its verging upon tenderness, and with a

singular attraction for thick-headedness, to decorate it with asses'
ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. But the Comic is a

different spirit.
You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to

detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and
more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes,

and accepting the correction their image of you proposes.
Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die

for the other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the
right moment; but if the wits were sufficiently quick for them to

perceive that they are in a comic situation, as affectionate couples
must be when they quarrel, they would not wait for the moon or the

almanac, or a Dorine, to bring back the flood-tide of tender
feelings, that they should join hands and lips.

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it,
you are slipping into the grasp of Satire.

If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric
rod, to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him

under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered
dubious whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of

Irony.
If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a

smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to
your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as

you expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.
The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit,

awakening and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not
to be confounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them,

differing from satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering
sensibilities, and from humour, in not comforting them and tucking

them up, or indicating a broader than the range of this bustling
world to them.

Fielding's Jonathan Wild presents a case of this peculiar
distinction, when that man of eminentgreatness remarks upon the

unfairness of a trial in which the condemnation has been brought
about by twelve men of the opposite party; for it is not satiric, it

is not humorous; yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain
protesting that his own 'party' should have a voice in the Law. It

opens an avenue into villains' ratiocination. {9} And the Comic is
not cancelled though we should suppose Jonathan to be giving play to

his humour. I may have dreamed this or had it suggested to me, for
on referring to Jonathan Wild, I do not find it.

Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who is ever certain of his
condemnation by the opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic,

and will be satiric.
The look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic. His

method of correcting the sentimental" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">sentimentalwriter is a mixture of the
comic and the humorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour. But

both the conception and the presentation of Alceste and of Tartuffe,
of Celimene and Philaminte, are purely comic, addressed to the

intellect: there is no humour in them, and they refresh the
intellect they quicken to detect their comedy, by force of the

contrast they offer between themselves and the wiser world about
them; that is to say, society, or that assemblage of minds whereof

the Comic spirit has its origin.
Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poeticsatire that

we have example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong
comic sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position,

which is directly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy,
judged by philosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this

deficiency. 'So bald er philosophirt ist er ein Kind,' Goethe says
of him. Carlyle sees him in this comic light, treats him in the

humorous manner.
The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on

a storage of bile.
The Ironeist is one thing or another, according to his caprice.

Irony is the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a