PHASES OF WITTICISM. 
JAMES D. BUTLER. 
What is wit? We know if we are not asked, but the more we 
ask the less we know. What is wit? Aristotle,said it was po¬ 
lite insult. Other definers for two and twenty centuries have 
been busy with it. They have seldom satisfied themselves and 
more seldom their readers. None of their definitions is so good 
as' that of a miracle by a little Sabbath school girl. When the 
lady teacher asked, What is a miracle? most of the class were 
silent, but the youngest of them said, “I can tell. My mother 
says it will be a miracle if you do not marry the new minister. ” 
It is more than two centuries since the most famous definition 
of wit was made, in the fourteenth sermon of Rev. Dr. Isaac Bar- 
row. Barrow branches out into twenty-seven ramifications which 
it would fatigue me to repeat and you to hear, but at last con¬ 
fesses that defining wit is showing the figure of the floating air, 
for, he adds, “Wit often consisteth in one knows not what and 
springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccount¬ 
able, answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and wind¬ 
ings of language.” 
We all feel that wit defies definition. Its domain expands be¬ 
yond all bounds, like Attica which Athenian school-boys were 
taught to say was bounded north by barley, south by vines, east 
by olives and west by wheat. Its invisible spirit, like the ex¬ 
pression on certain faces, is too subtle for the most cunning ar¬ 
tist to catch. 
But though wit in the abstract cannot be hemmed in by any 
form of words, we all know it in the concrete, as we know many 
a man by sight, whose depths we cannot fathom. Nothing so 
tickles us, nothing so torments us. Now it is a kiss, and anon 
a stab in the fifth rib. 
Without then philosophizing about wit, where we should find no 
end in wandering mazes lost, my present endeavor is to speak 
