bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, that they should join hands
and lips.

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you are
slipping into the grasp of Satire.

If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod,
to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under a semi-
caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious whether
indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of Irony.

If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack,
and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your
neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you
expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.

The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening
and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be
confounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them, differing from
satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and from
humour, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating a
broader than the range of this bustling world to them.

Fielding's Jonathan Wild presents a case of this peculiar distinction,
when that man of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of a trial
in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the
opposite party; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it is
immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own 'party'
should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into villains'
ratiocination. {9} And the Comic is not cancelled though we should