cast out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks.
She can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought
sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn rather gloomily,
after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our midst able men and
men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual navigation.
Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the poison of delusion
while Folly is passing from the state of vapour to substantial form.

O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,
Moliere! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when
you do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a
renovating air--the South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.

No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers. They
abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in
the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and
the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public
life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using
humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to
treat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of a
kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced
age. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to
the period of his death. There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he was
a man of profound egoism. Hence an argument arose, and was warmly