which by happy and easy touches of exaggeration the humourist renders so glaring. The humourist, I believe, as distinguished from the wit, always moves on the inner line of impulse and motive, always identifies himself more or less with the secret springs of paradox, always plays on the moral paradoxes of the mind within; while the wit occupies a critical and external position, and makes his play with the cross-purposes and antitheses he discovers in the field. of external thought or action. The most decisive note of the former is the preference for speaking by the very mouth of the person to be made ludicrous, of the latter the preference for launching criticisms at him from the outside. Where humour and wit are blended, as they so often are, the procedure is double, as in the saying of Coleridge I have analysed above; there is, in the first place, a sharp intellectual paradox to excite amusement; and then, when we pass beneath it to the play of feeling and motive in the mind of the wit, we find grotesque contrasts of moral scenery which are more amusing still, because they display humour as well as wit.

And if Dickens may fairly be called a great humourist in his moods of burlesque and travesty, such as those in the early part of Pickwick and of the American portion of Martin Chuzzlewit, he is infinitely more so in those moods in which he displays the plausibilities and falsehoods of human nature through the mouths of his chief favourites, his ideal vulgarities or impostures, Noah Claypole, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Pecksniff It will be asserted by some that this is not true humour, because these puppets of Dickens's are not real characters, because they are only glorified abstractions of cowardice,

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vanity, selfishness, and hypocrisy, and are free from all the inconsistencies of actual human nature. Doubtless they are not real men and women in the sense in which Shakespeare's characters, or Miss Austen's, or George Eliot's are real men and women. But I deny that this is in any way necessary for the purposes of a humourist. All that a humourist, as a humourist, can be expected to do, in order to attain the very perfection of humour, is to bring out perfectly the true moral absurdities and paradoxes in human nature; and this may be done as perfectly, I believe more perfectly, so far as the humorous effect alone goes,- -with a careful selection of moral qualities and a certain amount of subtle exaggeration of them, than it could be done with real men and women. Delightful as is the humour with which the birth-proud, purse-proud, and emptyheaded Lady Catherine de Bourgh is painted in Miss Austen's Pride and Prejudice,-when she says, for instance, to the heroine, "I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet, I send no compliments to your mother, you deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased," the feat of humour as such is not enhanced by the fact that Lady Catherine throughout is always sketched as she might really have been a narrow-minded, arrogant woman, so full of self-importance that she supposes any interruptions of the courtesies of life, on her part, will really be felt as severely as the withdrawal of an ambassador of a great State would be felt by the small State with which diplomatic relations were broken off. The humour of the conception, great as it is, is not at all the greater, I maintain, because the woman is truly painted and never overdrawn. Mr. Pecksniff is vastly overdrawn. No real hypocrite

would ever be so ostentatiously hypocritical as he is. Still, there is not less but more of real humour in that exhibition of him, as when he proposes to Martin Chuzzlewit to surprise his dear girls, and accordingly begins to walk softly and on tiptoe over the country though he was still a mile or two from home; or when he gets tipsy, and tells Mrs. Todgers of his late wife that "she was beautiful, Mrs. Todgers-she had a small property," than in the more delicate and real painting of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's immeasurable self-importance. The humour does not consist in the reality of the whole picture in either case, but in the shock of surprise with which the grotesque blending of mean and pretentious elements in human nature is in both cases alike brought home to the reader. Where this shock is keenest and full of real moral paradox the feat of humour is greatest. And that this is often greatest in cases where the humourist has left something out of nature, and perhaps exaggerated something else in it, in order to bring home his special paradox more powerfully, seems to me past doubt. Consider the wonderful humour with which the enormous and immeasurable vanity of the last person one would think likely to indulge vanity, a snuffy, intemperate, monthly nurse, is brought out in Mrs. Gamp. The mixture of brutal selfishness with that vanity is a much less subtle touch, for that might be suggested by the professional character of the woman. But the inexhaustible humour of the picture of Mrs. Gamp consists in her vanity, and the subtleties of device to which she has to resort in order to gratify it. These are the kind of conceptions which seem to me to place Dickens at the very head of all English

humourists. His best figures are pure embodiments of his humour,-not real characters at all, but illustrations, conceived with boundless wealth of conception, of the deepest moral incongruities of the heart.

"JOHN INGLESANT" ON HUMOUR

MR. SHORTHOUSE, in the fine piece of English which he has contributed to Macmillan's Magazine on "The Humorous in Literature," has, as I understand him, tried to make out a case for the necessarily close connection between the source of laughter and the source of tears in all true humour. He holds, apparently, that "the condition of true humorous thought is individuality," and that you can never get close to the sources of any individuality without getting at the common source of what is ridiculous and what is pathetic, without a blending of that which stirs laughter and that which stirs tears. Now, I have no objection at all to the doctrine that one of the finest and highest kinds of humour does play on the involutions of these blending chords of bright and sad feelings, and awaken them in the closest connection, and therefore in the most vivid contrast. Undoubtedly, this is one of the highest kinds of humour, and I entirely agree with Mr. Shorthouse, that if Jean Paul Richter is to be taken as the type of perfect humour, it is in feats of humour of this particular kind that the perfect humour has manifested itself. But what I do not see my way to conceding is that true humour is limited to humour of this special kind, which I