But we might fill the whole space of our article, ay, or of twenty
articles, with such illustrations; we will content ourselves with two
others. The idea is the same in both; but in the first it seems to have
a mixture of the witty and the humorous; in the second, it belongs
entirely to the humorous.

A lady at a dinner-party passing near where Talleyrand was standing,
he looked up and significantly exclaimed, "Ah!" In the course of the
dinner, the lady having asked him across the table, why on her entrance
he said "Oh!" Talleyrand, with a grave, self-vindicatory look,
answered,--"_Madame, je n'ai pas dit_ 'Oh!' _J'ai dit_ 'Ah!'"

Here is the second.--The Reverend Alonzo Fizzle had preached his
farewell-sermon to his disconsolate people in Drowsytown. The next
morning, Monday, he was strolling musingly along a silent road among the
melancholy woods. The pastor of a neighboring flock, the Reverend Darius
Dizzle, was driving by in his modest one-horse chaise.

"Take a seat, Fizzle?" said he. "Don't care if I do," said Fizzle,--and
took it.

"Why, the mischief, Fizzle," said Dizzle, "did you say in your
farewell-sermon, that it was just as well to preach to the dead buried
six feet under the earth as to the people of Drowsytown?"

_"I?--I?--I?"_ gasped the astonished Fizzle. "A more alive and wakeful
people are not upon the earth than the citizens of Drowsytown. What
calumniator has thus outraged them and _me_? Who told you this? _Who_
dared to say it?"