But though Sydney Smith could thus rival Johnson in Johnson's own domain, his own peculiar realm was one which Johnson could not enter. His wit was, at its best, the perfect wit of fancy. His well-known saying, for example, that a certain Dean deserved to be preached to death by wild curates, is one which it is impossible even to imagine in the mouth of Johnson. It is precisely one of those things which could have sprung up in no other mind than that which actually produced it. It bears, like wine, the tang of its own soil. The wit of it bears no resemblance to the wit of intellect. Reason has no part in it; the wit of fancy is "the insane root, which takes the reason prisoner." It would be hard to prove by logic where its merit lies. As Charles Lamb said of the story of the Oxford Scholar who met a porter carrying a hare and asked him whether it was his own hare or a wig-" There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blot ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof." It is, in short, the wit of fancy, and to fancy only it appeals.

Such was the most characteristic wit of Sydney Smith. Every idea that entered his mind seemed to be attended by a ludicrous image. Some one asked him what he thought of the Lord Mayor. "I felt myself in his presence,'' he said, "like the Roman whom Pyrrhus tried to frighten with an elephant, and remained calm." We will take one other example-one out of hundreds. My dear Rogers," he observed to the poet, "if we were both in America, we should be tarred and feathered; and lovely as we both are by nature, I should be an ostrich and you an emu.

No man, we think, ever equalled Sydney Smith in the wit of extravaganza.

He understood better than any other the artistic use of exaggeration. Mere exaggeration is not wit; nor can we lay down any law for making it be

pears at a place, though there is no garrison within twelve miles, the horizon is immediately clouded with majors."'

In this case it is not so much the mere exaggeration which gives it its effect, as the grotesquerie of the picture. which it presents to the mind's eye. Again :

"Such is the horror the French have of our cuisine, that at the dinner given in honor of Guizot at the Athenæum, his cook was heard to exclaim, Ah, mon pauvre maïtre! je ne le reverrai plus.”

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to say that Guizot's cook of course never exclaimed" anything of the kind, and that Sydney Smith invented the whole story. And a fine example of artistic exaggeration it is.

Theodore Hook was a wit of quite a different order. Wit, in him, sprang from an astonishingly fertile fancy, intense vivacity, and an ever-rushing flood of words.

He was probably the only really great improvisatore ever born in England. His extempore faculty has never, among us, been equalled or approached; and he had, besides, that strange personal magic which makes every word seem ten times wittier than if any one else had said it. His writings probably give a very faint notion of what he was in company. In this respect, his case resembles that of the great actors of the past; we are obliged to take his reputation, for the most part, on the testimony of others. But that

testimony is singularly striking. His habit of sitting down to the piano, and breaking out into a song, of which the words, and often the music, were composed at the moment; bringing in, as he went along, allusions to each of his listeners in turn, or to the incidents of the evening-the ease and happiness with which this was done, seems to have struck his contemporaries almost with a sense of the miraculous. The following account of one of these performances -it occurs in Lockhart's sketch in the Quarterly Review-is interesting on two accounts. It not only shows us Hook; it shows us Coleridge also, and in a curious light.

"The first time I ever witnessed one of his performances was at a gay young bachelor's villa at Highgate, when the other lion was one of a very different breed, Mr. Coleridge. Much claret had been shed before the Ancient Mariner' proclaimed that he could swallow no more of anything, unless it were punch. The materials were forthwith procured-the bowl was planted before the poet, and as he proceeded in his concoction, Hook, unbidden, took his place at the piano. He burst into a

bacchanal of egregious luxury, every line of which had reference to the author of Lay

Sermons' and the Aids to Reflection.' The room was becoming excessively hot; the first specimen of the new compound was handed to Hook, who paused to quaff it, and then, exclaiming that he was stifled, flung his glass through the window. Coleridge rose with the aspect of a benignant patriarch, and demolished another pane-the example was followed generally-the window was a sieve in an instant--the kind host was farthest from the mark, and his goblet made havoc of the chandelier. The roar of laughter was drowned in Hook's resumption of the song-and window, and chandelier, and the peculiar shot of each individual destroyer, had apt, and in many cases exquisitely witty, commemoration. In walking home with Mr. Coleridge he entertained and me with a most excellent lecture on the distinction between talent and genius, and declared that Hook was as true a genius as Dante-that was his example."

The picture of Coleridge, inspired by claret, thus " sounding on his way, like Chaucer's Scholar, in the middle of the night, is very characteristic and very amusing. And the text which he expounded is one full of interest, and may well detain us for a moment. What did Coleridge mean by saying that Hook was as true a genius as Dante? The assertion, at first sight, appears extravaganta mere flight of fancy. Yet a little reflection will show that it is

strictly true. What is genius? It is the faculty which effects easily, instinctively, and without knowledge of its own mode of acting, results which the intellect alone is unable, by any effort, to attain. The brain-power of Bacon and the brain-power of Newton put together could not have produced either the 'Inferno" nor one of Hook's songs. Hook, like Dante, could do one thing which no other man who ever lived was capable of doing; and this is not talent, but genius. Some such course of reasoning as this it was, we cannot doubt, but adorned with every grace of language and play of fancy, that on this occasion the old man eloquent poured forth upon the midnight air.

There is another faculty of Hook's which deserves consideration. His love of practical joking is well known. But perhaps it has been hardly noted how very different, at their best, were his exploits of this kind, from those which generally go by that name. This is a point on which we wish to make a few remarks, and to illustrate our meaning by an example.

We are accustomed, and generally quite justly, to regard the race of practical jokers with no friendly eye. Their exploits usually display not only want of feeling, but want of sense. The clown's stock joke, to tie a piece of string across a street, in order to see the passengers fall down and break their legs, is worthy of a clown. To send a man ten miles on a fool's errand, is not above the capacity of a fool. But Hook's exploits, at their best, were of a far different kind. Lockhart has left us an account of one of these, which, as his article is not widely known, we will permit ourselves to quote in full.

"He and Mathews, as they were rowing to Richmond, were suddenly bitten by the sight

of a placard at the foot of a Barnes gardenNobody permitted to land here-offenders prosecuted with the utmost Rigour of Law-thereupon followed their instant debarkation on the forbidden paradise-the fishing-line converted into a surveyor's measuring-tape-their solemn pacing to and fro on the beautiful lawn-Hook the surveyor, with his book and pencil in hand -Mathews the clerk, with the cord and walk

ing-stick, both soon pinned into the exquisite turf;--the opening of the parlor door, and fiery approach of the napkined alderman- the comedians' cool, indifferent reception of him and his indignant enquiries; their gradual an

nouncement of their being the agents of the Canal Company, settling where the new cut is to cross the old gentleman's pleasaunce :— his alarm and horror, which call forth the unaffected regrets and commiseration of the unfortunate officials, never more pained than with such a duty;' the alderman's suggestion that they had better walk in and talk the matter over; their anxious examination of watches and reluctant admission that they might spare a quarter of an hour- but alas! no use, they fear, none whatever';-the entry of the dining-room-the turkey just served-the pressing invitation to taste a morsel-the excellent dinner-the fine old Madeira-the bottle of pink champagne, a present from My Lord Mayor'

-the discussion of half a dozen of claret and

of the projected branch of the canal-the City knight's arguments getting more and more weighty- Really this business must be reconsidered-one bottle more, dear gentlemen' till at last it is getting dark-they are eight miles from Westminster Bridge-Hook bursts out into song and relates the whole transaction, winding up with

Sir, we greatly approve of your fare,
Your cellar's as prime as your cook-
My friend's Mr. Mathews the player,
And I'm Mr. Theodore Hook!"

Now this, it need scarcely be observed, could never have been either conceived or executed, except by a man of the very rarest gifts. It is a little comedy, played in real life, by a born actor. It is a thing which, as far as we can tell, no other man who ever lived could have conceived and carried out in detail. Coleridge would certainly have called it genius. It is sufficient for us to note, that it is marked by a character quite its own.

Sheridan had every kind of wit, both of intellect and fancy. But, unless we are mistaken, he had no style which stands alone, distinct from that of any other man. He had nothing corresponding to Hook's extempore faculty, or to Sydney Smith's amazing witchery of fancy. His best things were the result of thought and preparation; and the germ, even of these, was often borrowed. Yet Sydney Smith and Hook put together could not have produced The School for Scandal. Nor need we say that Sheridan was much more than a great wit. He wrote, it is true, the wittiest comedy on the stage; but he also delivered in Parliament the finest speech ever pronounced before the Speaker's chair. His mind was a curious compound of the great and little and his wit bore the impression of his

mind. In the debates of the House, it sparkled like some rare spar among a heap of pebbles. His power over that august Assembly resembled a sort of spell-now, as with the speech on Warren Hastings, arousing such a tempest of excitement that no other speaker could be heard-now gravely bamboozling the Queen's most faithful Commons with a piece of jargon which sounded something like a Greek quotation, and which he pretended was out of Pindar. His wit, like an elephant's proboscis, could uproot an oak-tree, or pick up a pin. It could make great statesmen look little and ridiculous. It could swindle a tradesman out of a pair of boots. It could proclaim, as he was picked up in the gutter, full of wine, that his name was Wilberforce, and that he was not often thus. Regarding this last case, it may be noted that Sheridan was seldom too far gone for a bon mot. On another occasion his doctor, finding him engaged with the sixth bottle, gravely warned him that he was infallibly destroying the coats of his stomach. "Then, replied Sheridan, coolly filling his glass, my stomach must digest in its waistcoat.'

A more interesting, a more extraordinary character than Sheridan's never existed in this world. But his wit, as we have said, resembled rather the wit of all other men put together than any striking faculty which belonged to himself alone. And doubtless this is the reason why he has been made to stand godfather to more jokes, good and bad, that were not his, than any other man who ever lived.

he

Douglas Jerrold had something in common with both Hook and Sydney Smith. But on the whole his wit has a peculiar flavor, not to be mistaken, which marks it as his own. It is bitterer than Hook's; it is less original than Sydney Smith's; it is different from both. Yet the difference is one rather to be felt than argued. "I see,' once remarked to a certain parvenu, who had suddenly sprung out of the dregs of society, and who now appeared on horseback in the Row-" I see you now ride upon your cat's-meat." This is exactly Douglas Jerrold, sting and all. We will take another example. A bon vivant, who had already been looking on the

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wine when it was red, inquired of him the way to the "Judge and Jury.' "Keep in the way you are going,' said Jerrold, and you will be sure to get there". '-a reply which reminds one of the story told of Bishop Wilberforce and a country fellow, one of a group of loungers, who asked him jestingly which was the way to Heaven. Turn to the right, and keep straight on," replied the Bishop. This (if indeed it is not too ingenious to have been ever really spoken) was a mixture of epigram, pun, repartee, and moral maxim, all in one. Jerrold, like all the wits of fancy, did not, on occasion, scorn a pun. We are not, perhaps, in our days, the best judges of this kind of wit; the dull and cold-hearted mangling of words, to which alone we are accustomed, has spoiled our taste and made us hate the word. A pun, if it is witty, is more than a mere jingling play of words-it presents, as well, a humorous idea. If we consider this distinction we shall perhaps be disposed to raise a certain class of puns from the low estate into which the general kind has fallen. According to our view, the merit of a pun depends entirely on the degree with which it presents, besides the play of words, a humorous idea to the mind. Hook's best pun, in his own opinion, was that made to a friend who pointed out a placard bearing the inscription, half-effaced, Warren's BWhat ought to follow," he observed, "is lacking." This is admirable of its kindbut Hook shall give us another. James Smith said of their friend Hill, that it was impossible to discover his age, for the parish-register had been burned in the Fire of London. Pooh, pooh," said Hook, he is one of the little Hills that are spoken of as skipping in the Psalms.''

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Now the wit of this is not so much in the pun itself as in the idea which it conveys. It is, in fact, an example of the same kind of successful exaggeration of which Sydney Smith is the great master.

Jerrold's puns were often of this order. We will take a single instance. Waiter, bring a bottle of old port; mind, old port, not elder.'

Hood was, we think, the best punmaker in our language. We know what Johnson thought of puns; and the best of those which we have quoted would very certainly have made the sage, to use the graphic phrase of Boswell," puff in high disdain. But there are certain puns of Hood's which we think might have converted even him. The puns of others sparkle, but are cold; Hood's have the warmth of life. In his last illness, when he was wasted to a shadow, a mustard poultice was to be applied to his chest. Ah, doctor, said the poor patient, smiling faintly, it is a great deal of mustard to so little meat.' Who could have thought that a pun could be pathetic? Where shall we find an instance, out of Hood?

The examples which we have taken, in our comparison of styles, have been selected wholly among wits whose reputation is based rather on their talk than on their writings. We had intended to consider further, from the same point of view, some of the famous wits whose best things are to be found only in their books. But the subject is too wide, however tempting-and we must turn away. The world of wit is an Enchanted Ground; and they who enter it must needs beware, lest, like the lotos-eaters, they forget themselves among its pleasant places, and linger there too long.Temple Bar.

Killarney.

I HAVE for some time past been intending to send you a further instalment of "Hibernicisms, but this relaxing climate renders any exercise of the intellect a serious exertion, even though that exercise is of so mild an order as the sorting and selecting of a few anec

dotes already jotted down or memorized," as the Americans say. But this morning the writing-room is deserted, my invalid friend is so much better as to dispense with my attendance for a few hours, and I feel that the moment has arrived for fulfilling my long-postponed intention. As, however, the

heading of my letter may give rise to suspicions, inasmuch as Killarney is a notorious centre for the manufacture of anecdote, I can only assure my readers that the following illustrations of Irish humor and Irish modes of thought are in nearly every case drawn from my own experience or that of members of my family, and that I am not aware of any of them having found their way into print before.

I have on a former occasion given specimens of the quaint wording of petitions for medical assistance or pecuniary aid. Here is a literal transcription of a document lying before me as I write, which is typical of the literature of rustic supplication :-" REV. SIR,I hope you rember I being talking to you in last Thuesday, about the charitable assistance towards the damage done to me by the lightening. So when your Rev. read the memorial you told me to come in two days time and that you would give me one pound so I came in Sauterday and you were after leaving the day before, so I hope your Rev. arrived home safe. So I will expect from your Rev. that you will send it by post to me, as it was my own fault not to go for it, the day your Rev. told me—as it is as big Charity as was ever done, as it was the will of Providence to leave me in such a need as I am at prest. but God spare the gentlemen of the place they have done a great deal for me at Present. I am your Obedient Servant,

It is hard to say which is the more characteristic feature of the foregoing letter,its inconsequent reasoning or its fatalism. The allusion to charity reminds me of a curious commentary which is furnished by an Irish expression, upon the text "He that giveth to the poor, lendeth unto the Lord." Not long ago, as 1 was driving along the Glengarriff road, I was solicited by an old man, well known to tourists, for a contribution to enable him to rebuild his

cottage. When I reminded him that he had been making the same request for a good many years, and had nothing to show for the donations entered in his book, he waxed eloquent on his miseries, and wound up by exclaiming that he had nothing at all but God Almighty in the middle of the road,-meaning the alms of the passer-by. On the last

two occasions on which I have taken . this road, the old man was not forthcoming; but his place was taken by a number of little barefooted boys and girls, each with a wild flower or pseudoKillarney fern in his or her hand. While still at a distance from them, I said to my driver, Children going home from school, I suppose?" on which he replied, "No, Sir, but they're hunting the day-car for book-money," which being interpreted means that they were lying in wait for the daily tourist-car which plies between Glengarriff and Killarney, in order to ask the passengers for pennies to buy a book,' for in this ingenious way have they been taught to cover with the plea of a thirst for information what is too often their parents' thirst for whiskey. The most extraordinary demand, however, that has come within the range of my experience was that of a woman who begged for a subsidy to replace the funds expended in waking" her mother, "for," as she added, if we did, we waked her too soon, for she came to life again. From illegitimate I pass to legitimate demands, some of which are often exceedingly diverting. A peculiarly comic effect is produced in some of them by the use of a certain condensed form of speech, exactly similar to that called of grammarians "brachyology." Instances of this figure are supplied by the cobbler's bill,

"For soling and heeling Master Charles; better still by the charge-I forget of how much--" for welting the masther and turning up Miss Kitty." The accompanying document shows that even a Kerry butcher is capable of a fine epistolary style :-" Mrs. -Please to have me paid for the killing of ten sheep at the moderate charge of 6d. each, which is equal to 5 shillings. And I'll feel inuch pleasure in remaining your ever faithful servant, TIMOTHY MCGILLYCUDDY." It is a peculiarity of the Irish peasant that he has a way of irresistibly tickling your sense of the ridiculous just at the very moment when you are most anxious to exhibit your sympathy. Our boatman, who lost his brother a few years back, was giving me some account of the latter's last illness, in which he sorely tried my gravity by saying,-" He had an airy fit, yer honor, and then, saving your presence, he was