of the people has been and must continue to be important. We have doubtless discovered, too, that, as a distinguished. American divine has expressed it, "fiction swarms with vitality akin to that of nature in her range from hummingbird to vulture, spaniel to tiger, and from rose and lily to nightshade and upas-tree." To the student of literature, at the present time, a knowledge of the prose fiction of our language is perhaps more absolutely indispensable than a knowledge of any other department either of prose or poetry. The novel is something more than mere storytelling. It has come to be an intellectual force, the influence of which no man of intelligence can afford to ignore.

REFERENCES.

Dunlop's History of Fiction (1814).

J. C. Jeaffreson's Novels and Novelists.

David Masson's British Novelists and their Styles.

Nassau Senior's Essays on Fiction.

H. T. Tuckerman's Literature of Fiction (an essay).

Hazlitt's English Comic Writers.

Thackeray's English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.

Besant's French Humorists.

Hallam's Literature of Europe.

SWIFT: See Forster's Life of Swift; Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature; Scott's Memoir of Dean Swift; Taine's English Literature.

DEFOE: See Stephen's Hours in a Library; Minto's Defoe, in English Men of Letters; Charles Lamb's Works.

GODWIN See Life, by C. Kegan Paul.

SCOTT: See Life, by J. G. Lockhart; Scott, by R. H. Hutton, in English Men of Letters; Carlyle's Essays; Stephen's Hours in a Library; Shaw's Manual of English Literature.

MISS BURNEY (MADAME D'ARBLAY): See Macaulay's Essays; Hazlitt's English Novelists; Miss Kavanagh's English Women of Letters.

DICKENS: See Life, by John Forster; Yesterdays With Authors, by J. T. Fields; Horne's New Spirit of the Age; Taine's English Literature. THACKERAY: See Hannay's Studies on Thackeray; Hannay's Characters and Sketches; Thackeray, by Anthony Trollope, in English Men of Letters; Taine's English Literature.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE: See Life, by Mrs. Gaskell; Miss Martineau's Biographical Sketches; Thackeray's Roundabout Papers.

CHARLES BROCK DEN BROWN: See Sparks's American Biography; Griswold's Prose Writers of America.

HAWTHORNE: See Life, by H. A. Page; Hawthorne, by J. T. Fields; Hawthorne, by Henry James, Jr., in English Men of Letters; Roscoe's Essays.

For other names, see reference-lists elsewhere.

CHAPTER IX.

WIT, HUMOR, AND SATIRE.

Of Wit and Humor-Sir Thomas Browne-Vulgar Errors-The Garden of Cyrus-Addison as a Humorist-Swift-A Tale of a Tub-A Modest Proposal-Defoe-The Shortest Way with Dissenters-Laurence Sterne-Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith-Sydney Smith— Charles Lamb-Thackeray as a Humorist-Thomas Carlyle-Sartor Resartus Latter-Day Pamphlets - Dr. Holmes-Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

WORKS of humor, like works of pure fiction, exert an influence over the thoughts and feelings of the reader by the mere force of contact and suggestion. Like the works of the poets, they are the most perfect when they are the spontaneous expression of unstudied emotion. Humor differs in many ways from Wit as we understand it in its most restricted sense. Wit consists in the quick perception of unexpected relations between unlike objects: Humor is the observing of persons, actions, and things from a standpoint peculiar to the humorist alone, and is the formulating of strange, uncommon ideas concerning them. Wit is the flash of sudden inspiration: Humor is most frequently the result of careful observation and of sober thought. Wit, from the very nature of its origin, looks at the outside of things, and perishes with a smile: Humor penetrates beneath the surface, and insinuates itself into the very heart of its object. Wit is the lightning-stroke which burns, scathes, and destroys: Humor is the genial sunlight which, although it may expose to view the scars and deformities of our nature, heals them by its very spirit of kindliness. Wit, if it seeks reformation at all, seeks it by means of ridicule and pitiless castigation: Humor improves and corrects through the medium of

sympathy and delicate persuasion. The faculty of Wit may be improved by practice, the capacity for Humor by study; both are primarily the gifts of the gods, and come not at the call of him who desires them. Wit sparkles in the pages of most of our greatest writers: Humor lends lustre to the productions of a select, inspired few.

Mirth changes with humanity. That which the people of one generation laugh at and cry over is regarded by those of the next with apparent indifference; and things which were once revered as sacred and sober realities are afterwards made the objects of ridicule and sarcasm. The coarse humor of some of the Canterbury Tales was doubtless greatly relished by readers in Chaucer's day, but in our time these stories scarcely provoke a smile upon the face of the most prurient. The morality plays and interludes which, in the infancy of our drama, furnished infinite amusement to all grades of society, would now be regarded as productions not even worthy of our contempt. But the brilliant flashes of wit with which the plays of Shakspeare are illuminated will never lose their interest or their force; the dry humors of Ben Jonson will never cease to glow for him who cares to discover them beneath the mass of pedantry with which they are too often burdened; the satire which composes some of Dryden's noblest pieces, although it has ceased to be relished, will always be admired; and the sharp-cutting sarcasm and the brilliant burlesques of Pope, although less enjoyable now than when their subjects were alive and well known, are none the less appreciated. But of the poets, and of their genial humor and their keen satire, we have already spoken. In prose we find but little that can with propriety be called either wit or humor until we come to the writings of the quaint and eccentric Sir Thomas Browne.

That Sir Thomas understood and appreciated the sterling qualities of genuine humor there is no doubt. “For," said he, "let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say that I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that

can convert poverty into riches, adversity into prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." His books have sometimes been classified with essays, sometimes with works on theology; and he was probably, as he desired to be, misunderstood by even his contemporaries, and regarded as a sober but extravagant speculator seeking the truth among the unknowable. Whatever of sincerity there may or may not have been in his arguments and inquiries, he was fundamentally and essentially a humorist, always with an eye for detecting remote analogies and for bringing the most incongruous objects into grotesque relationship. His Inquiry into Vulgar Errors is like an old curiosity-shop in which the proprietor has arranged his collection of odds and ends, his stuffed animals, his fossils and skeletons, into grotesque and fanciful groups with the design of puzzling the sober-minded and amusing the thoughtless. Instead of telling us how the Vulgar Errors which form the subject of his book may be detected and avoided, he wanders at once into the region of the speculative and the marvelous. The story of Adam and Eve has a peculiar fascination for him, and he gravely inquires what would have been the consequences to humanity had our first parents partaken of the fruit of the tree of life before tasting of that which grew on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan, he declares, has been the cause of most of the errors of humanity, and yet he argues, with every appearance of sincerity, that the father of lies was a better man than Cain. He reviews all the marvelous stories extant about griffins, the phoenix, dragons, salamanders, basilisks, and those other wonderful creations of fancy with which the unknown regions of the earth were believed to be peopled. He tells us that elephants are popularly supposed to be boneless; that storks refuse to live in any country which is not a republic; that a dead kingfisher

*Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646.