WIT AND HUMOR.

In what wit consists, and why it is we laugh, are questions hard to answer (read on that subject Spencer and Hobbes, and Mathews' "Wit and Humor; their Use and Abuse"); but certain it is that a little seasoning of fun makes intellectual food very palatable, and much better adapts it for universal and permanent assimilation. Most men can keep what is tied to their memories with a joke. Considering all things, Lowell, Holmes, Dickens, and Cervantes are the best humorists the world affords. See Table III. Group 4. They exhibit a union of power and purpose that is not found elsewhere. They always subordinate wit to wisdom, always aim at something far higher than making fun for its own sake, never appear to make any effort for their effects, and always polish their work to perfection. A great deal of the keenest wit will be found in books whose general character puts them in some other column,—Poetry, Fiction, Oratory, etc. The works of Shakspeare, Addison, Eliot, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Irving, Higginson, Carleton, Thackeray, Hood, Saxe, Fielding, Smollett, Aristophanes, Molière, etc., abound in wit and humor.

The student of humor will be interested in Hazlitt's "English Comic Writers," Thackeray's "English Humorists," and Besant's "French Humorists."