the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object,
or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to
be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its
intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of
ambiguity.

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the
feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But
the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the
Comic poet.

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. The
juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the
two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound in
one by laughter. The knight's great aims and constant mishaps, his
chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along the
highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks out of
derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking through
the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in the
loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
narrative.

The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy
in his laughter.

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our
description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of
festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under
the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear