96 BIr. William Samuel Lilly [March 18, 



country. Most of them seem so plain and intelligible as to require 

 no discussion. We all know, for instance, what Puns, Charades and 

 Conundrums are. We all know, or may know with a little reflection, 

 what is properly meant by Sarcasm, Banter, Caricature. But there 

 are four varieties of the Ludicrous which seem to present special 

 difficulties. And upon these I must offer a few remarks. 



First then in this catalogue of mine stands Humour, which seems 

 to me beyond question the highest manifestation of the Ludicrous. 

 And I do not think we can have a better account of Humour than 

 one given by an admirable writer to whom some of us had the 

 pleasure of listening in this place yesterday afternoon : " That spirit 

 of playing with the vain world and all that therein is, familiar to 

 Socrates, which is always more or less discernible in the highest 

 natures." * The question is often asked, What is the dilierence 

 between Humour and Wit ? A great many different answers have 

 been given, one of the least satisfactory of them, as it seems to me, 

 being Sidney Smith's in the ' Lectures on Moral Philosophy ' which 

 he delivered here ninety years ago. I shall return to that presently. 

 For myself I would say, borrowing from the German a distinction 

 now pretty familiar to cultivated people throughout the world, that 

 Wit specially implies Understanding — Verstand — while Humour has 

 most in common with Eeason — Vernunft — in which there is always 

 an element, latent it may be, of tragedy. The greatest humorist in 

 Shakespeare is " the melancJioly Jacques." And here I am reminded 

 of some words of that most accomplished critic, the late Mr. Walter 

 Pater. In his Essay on Charles Lamb he characterises Wit as " that 

 unreal and transitory mirth which is as the crackling of thorns under 

 a pot," and Humour as " the laughter which blends with tears, and 

 even with the subtleties of the imaginaticm, and which, in its most 

 exquisite motives is one with pity — the laughter of the Comedies of 

 Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of seriousness or 

 solemnity of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing 

 from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine and con- 

 tagious." This is, I think, true as regards Humour, although it 

 hardly does justice to Wit. What Sidney Smith says in his ' Lectures ' 

 about Wit and Humour appears to me most unsatisfactory, which is 

 the more surprising since he himself was doubtless one of the wittiest 

 of his generation. Humour, he tells us, consists in " discovering in- 

 congruity between ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone." 

 It is a surjjrising proposition ; but at all events it becomes intelligible 

 when we see what it is that he means by Humour. He gives three 

 instances : A young officer of eighteen years of age coming into 

 company in full uniform, but with a wig on his head, such as was 

 worn at the beginning of this century by grave and respectable 

 clergymen advanced in years ; a corpulent and respectable tradesman, 



* Dr. William Barry, the author of ' The New Antigone,' in an Essay on 

 Carlyle. 



