the floor, even when that floor is covered by good carpets. Now all claims to civilization are suspended till this secretion is otherwise disposed of. No English gentleman has spit upon the floor since the Heptarchy."

To take another example:

:

"Railroad travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly longer and quicker than a Solan goose. The mamma rushes sixty miles in two hours to the aching finger of her conjugating and declining grammar boy. The early Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly before the setting sun. The Puseyite priest, after a rush of a hundred miles, appears with his little volume of nonsense at the breakfast of his bookseller." His handling of the Deluge is equally characteristic of his ingenuity in devising extreme illustrations :

"It appears, also, that from thence (the Deluge) a great alteration was made in the longevity of mankind, who, from a range of seven or eight hundred years, which they enjoyed before the flood, were confined to their present period of seventy or eighty years. This epoch in the history of man gave birth to the twofold division of the antediluvian and the postdiluvian style of writing, the latter of which naturally contracted itself into those inferior limits which were better accommodated to the abridged duration of human life and literary labour. Now, to forget this event,—to write without the fear of the deluge before his eyes, and to handle a subject as if mankind could lounge over a pamphlet for ten years, as before their submersion,-is to be guilty of the most grievous error into which a writer can possibly fall."

In the Pennsylvanian Letters, all his power of illustration was used for invective, of which these letters still remain one of our best modern examples.

Of the Court of Chancery he said-it was like a boaconstrictor, which swallowed up the estates of English gentlemen in haste, and digested them at leisure'.

One of his greatest efforts to set forth the comic side of Oddity, is his account of the Natural History of Botany Bay:

"In this remote part of the earth, nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms, and all regular and useful productions, for the rest of the world) seems determined to have a bit of play, and amuse herself as she

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pleases. Accordingly, she makes cherries with the stone on the outside, and a monstrous animal as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit, a tail as big as a bedpost, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile, with three or four young kangaroos looking out of its false uterus to see what is passing. Then comes a quadruped as big as a large cat, with the eyes, colour and skin of a mole, and the bill and webfeet of a duck-puzzling Dr. Shaw, and rendering the latter half of his life miserable, from the utter inability to determine whether it was a bird or a beast. Add to this a parrot, with the eyes of a sea-gull; a skate, with the head of a shark; and a bird of such monstrous dimensions, that a side bone of it will dine three real carnivorous Englishmen; together with many other productions that agitate Sir Joseph Banks, and fill him with mingled emotions of distress and delight."

The personalities at the expense of Dr. Shaw and Sir Joseph Banks are typical of the best kind of humour-the infliction of a kind of pain that is real in its way, but devoid of positive harm.

The writings and sayings of Douglas Jerrold exemplify nearly all the round of witty effects, and are a sufficient repertory for testing both the definition and the rhetorical canons of legitimate wit. The general tendency of his wit, as of nearly all wit, is depreciatory, but he could also use it in the enforcement of a truth. His observation upon the work of a certain painter, described as mediocre, was—‘The worst ochre that an artist can paint with '. *

The Irish Bull is a form of wit, accompanied with humour. Its original start was intellectual weakness or incapacity, such as belongs to children and the inferior races. It is now a cultivated art; by the support of invention, it has been found capable of supplying endless touches of amusement, and even telling illustrations in oratory.

In one form, it is a failure (real or assumed) to see the higher or technical and acquired meanings of language. An accused party is asked whether he is guilty or not

*The best collection of Jerrold's conversational witticisms may be found in Mark Lemon's Jest-Book-an admirable collection of witty sayings from many sources.

guilty, and replies, 'That is for you to find out. Another answers to the same question: I must hear the evidence first'. There is a real or affected ignoring of the technical purpose of the interrogation.

The intellectual deficiency takes also the shape of incapacity to grasp an entire situation: as when a patient complained to his Doctor that an emetic would not stay on his stomach; the exceptional character of the drug being purposely misconceived.

The keeping out of view correlative or implied circumstances is a frequent form of the Bull. The proposal to lengthen a blanket by cutting off a piece from the bottom to sew it to the top, is a familiar illustration. So, a cell has so low a ceiling that you cannot stand up in it without lying down. In Logic, there is a class of Fallacies of Relativity, which would comprise a large number of Bulls.

Glaring self-contradiction is one pervading character of Irish wit. Edgeworth, in his Essay on Bulls, popularized this anecdote. Some one engaged in writing a letter, being overlooked, concluded in the words—' I would say more, but a tall Irishman is reading over my shoulder every word I write'. You lie, you scoundrel,' said the Irishman.

America rejoices in an unlimited production of Humour and Wit. Washington Irving took the lead. Sam Slick had a run in the last generation. Lowell is distinguished for witty Satire. Artemus Ward is a perpetual fountain of

oddities. Mark Twain illustrates most of the devices of Humour, but he employs with special frequency the method of making himself the object of ludicrous degradation. It is his way also to convey interesting information and shrewd reflections, though expressed in ways to provoke laughter; as in his records of travel. In the miscellaneous outpouring of humour in the daily newspapers, the pun outnumbers every other form; and the effect is in an equal proportion derogatory.

Knickerbocker's History of New York, says Professor Nichol, in point of pure originality, Irving's masterpiece, is one of the richest farragos of fact, fancy and irony that have ever issued from the press'.

Lowell's Biglow Papers are perpetual coruscations of Wit; but the underlying object is not enough concealed: the author is too obviously a partisan, and, what is still

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worse, a moralist. In his new volume, Heartease and Rue, there is the following on a dinner-speech :

'Tis a time for gay fancies, as fleeting and vain

As the whisper of foam-beads on fresh-poured champagne,
Since dinners, perhaps, were not strictly designed
For manoeuvering the heavy dragoons of the mind.
When I hear your set speeches that start with a pop,
Then wander and maunder, too feeble to stop,
With a vague apprehension from popular rumour
There used to be something by mortals called humour,
Beginning again when you thought they were done,
Respectable, sensible, weighing a ton,

And as near to the present occasions of men
As a Fast-Day discourse of the year eighteen-ten;
I-well, I sit still, and my sentiments smother,
For am not I also a bore and a brother?

The denunciation and satire is relieved by the two last lines where he includes himself. (See Professor Nichol's review of the American Wits and Humorists, and his criticism of Emerson and Lowell in particular.)

MELODY.

1. The Melody or Music of Language involves both the Voice and the Ear.

What is hard to pronounce is not only disagreeable as a vocal effort, but also painful to listen to.

2. Of the letters of the Alphabet, the abrupt consonants are the most difficult to utter; the vowels, the easiest.

As in movements generally, so with the voice, a sudden jerk or stoppage is painful. The most jerky of all the letters are the sharp mutes-p, t, k. Next are their aspirated forms-f, th (thin), h. The corresponding flat mutes areb, v; d, th (thy); 9: these are still easier, as allowing continuance of the voice; the sudden check is absent. Thus, above is easier than put, puff; gather than cut, heath.

The liquids, l, m, n, ng, r, and the sibilants, s, sh, z, zh, are all continuous sounds, approaching in this respect to the vowels; while w and y are a kind of consonant vowels. There is no abruptness in rain, loom, sing, shame, leisure. The Greek and Roman languages (the Greek more) showed a preference for the flat mutes, the liquids and the sibilants; and, for the most part, softened the sharp mutes, especially p, t, k, by combination with the more flowing letters, as clepsydra, prurient.

3. Words being made up of alternate vowels and consonants, either singly, or in combinations, the more abrupt consonants are most easily pronounced when single, and when alternating with long vowels. They then favour rapidity of movement.

The words picket, capital, alternate sharp mutes and short vowels; the presence of one or more long vowels gives greater ease to the voice, as in tapioca, tape, peat.