the absurdity of not paying; and in order to do this, an impossibility is assumed by running a parallel on the phrases, "paying every other time," and "coming every other time," as if the coming went for nothing without paying, and thus, by the very contrast and contradiction in the terms, showing the most perfect contempt for the literal coming, of which the essence, viz. paying, was left out. It is, in short, throwing the most killing scorn upon, and fairly annihilating the coming without paying, as if it were possible to come and not to come at the same time, by virtue of an identical proposition or form of speech applied to contrary things. The wit so far, then, consists in suggesting, or insinuating indirectly, an apparent coincidence between two things, to make the real incongruity, by the recoil of the imagination, more palpable than it could have been without this feigned and artificial approximation to an union between them. This makes the difference between jest and earnest, which is essential to all wit. It is only make-believe. It is a false pretence set up, or the making one thing pass in supposition for another, as a foil to the truth. when the mask is removed. There need not be laughter, but there must be deception and surprise otherwise, there can be no wit. When

Archer, in order to bind the robbers, suddenly makes an excuse to call out to Dorinda, "Pray lend me your garter, Madam," this is both witty and laughable. Had there been any propriety in the proposal or chance of compliance with it, it would no longer have been a joke: had the question been quite absurd and uncalled-for, it would have been mere impudence and folly; but it is the mixture of sense and nonsense, that is, the pretext for the request in the fitness of a garter to answer the purpose in question, and the totally opposite train of associations between a lady's garter (particularly in the circumstances which had just happened in the play) and tying a rascally robber's hands behind his back, that produces the delightful equivoque and unction of the passage in Farquhar. It is laughable, because the train of inquiry it sets in motion is at once on pleasant and on forbidden ground. We did not laugh in the former case-"Then only come every other time"--because it was a mere ill-natured exposure of an absurdity, and there was an end of it but here, the imagination courses up and down along a train of ideas, by which it is alternately repelled and attracted, and this produces the natural drollery or inherent ludicrousness. It is the difference between the wit

VOL. I.

E

of humour and the wit of sense.

Once more,

suppose you take a stupid, unmeaning likeness of a face, and throwing a wig over it, stick it on a peg, to make it look like a barber's blockthis is wit without words. You give that which is stupid in itself the additional accompaniments of what is still more stupid, to enhance and verify the idea by a falsehood. We know the head so placed is not a barber's block; but it might, we see, very well pass for one. This is caricature or the grotesque. The face itself might be made infinitely laughable, and great humour be shown in the delineation of character it is in combining this with other artificial and aggravating circumstances, or in the setting of this piece of lead that the wit appears.* RECAPITULATION. It is time to stop short in this list of digressions, and try to join the scattered threads together. We are

too apt, both from the nature of language and the turn of modern philosophy, which reduces every thing to simple sensations, to consider whatever bears one name as one thing in itself, which prevents our ever properly understanding those mixed modes and various clusters of ideas,

The common trick of making an imitation of the human countenance with a napkin or the ends of the knuckles comes under the head of wit, not humour.

to which almost all language has a reference. Thus if we regard wit as something resembling a drop of quicksilver, or a spangle from off a cloak, a little nimble substance, that is pointed and glitters (we do not know how) we shall make no progress in analysing its varieties or its essence; it is a mere word or an atom: but if we suppose it to consist in, or be the result of, several sets and sorts of ideas combined together or acting upon each other (like the tunes and machinery of a barrel-organ) we may stand some chance of explaining and getting an insight into the process. Wit is not, then, a single idea or object, but it is one mode of viewing and representing nature, or the differences and similitudes, harmonies and discords in the links and chains of our ideas of things at large. If all our ideas were literal, physical, confined to a single impression of the object, there could be no faculty for, or possibility of, the existence of wit, for its first principle is mocking, or making a jest of anything, and its first condition or postulate, therefore, is the distinction between jest and earnest. First of

all, wit implies a jest, that is, the bringing forward a pretended or counterfeit illustration of a thing; which, being presently withdrawn, makes the naked truth more apparent

by contrast. It is lessening and undermining our faith in any thing (in which the serious consists) by heightening or exaggerating the vividness of our idea of it, so as by carrying it to extremes to show the error in the first concoction, and from a received practical truth and object of grave assent, to turn it into a laughing stock to the fancy. This will apply to Archer and the lady's garter, which is ironical: but how does it connect with the comparison of Hudibras's beard to a tile, which is only an exaggeration; or the Compagnons d'Ulysse, which is meant for a literal and severe truth, as well as a play upon words? More generally then, wit is the conjuring up in the fancy any illustration of an idea by likeness, combination of other images, or by a form of words, that being intended to point out the eccentricity or departure of the original idea from the class to which it belongs does so by referring it contingently and obliquely to a totally opposite class, where the surprise and mere possibility of finding it, proves the inherent want of congruity. Hudibras's beard is transformed (by wit) into a tile: a strong man is transformed (by imagination) into a tower. The objects, you will say, are unlike in both cases; yet the comparison in one case is meant seriously, in the other it is