The following extract, from a journal which I will not advertise, may
serve as an example:

"Lycurgus, when they had abandoned to his revenge him who had put out
his eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was
sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does
not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac
knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when
he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in
composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how
exquisitely humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister,
that a beautiful tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went
on to explain that it glistened in her right eye and not in her left,
because she had had a wart on her left which had been removed--and
successfully. Goethe probably wrote this without a chuckle; he
believed what a good many people who have never read Wilhelm Meister
believe still, namely, that it was a work full of pathos, of fine and
tender feeling; yet a less consummate humorist must have felt that
there was scarcely a paragraph in it from first to last the chief
merit of which did not lie in its absurdity.

Another example may be taken from Bacon of the manner in which
sayings which drop from men unconsciously, give the key of their
inner thoughts to another person, though they themselves know not
that they have such thoughts at all; much less that these thoughts
are their only true convictions. In his Essay on Friendship the
great philosopher writes: "Reading good books on morality is a
little flat and dead." Innocent, not to say pathetic, as this
passage may sound it is pregnant with painful inferences concerning
Bacon's moral character. For if he knew that he found reading good