precipice. It is astonishing how much wit or laughter there is in the world-it is one of the staple commodities of daily life-and yet, being excited by what is out of the way and singular, it ought to be rare, and gravity should be the order of the day. Its constant recurrence from the most trifling and trivial causes, shows that the contradiction is less to what we find things than to what we wish them to be. A circle of milliner'sgirls laugh all day long at nothing, orday after day at the same thingsthe same cant phrase supplies the wags of the town with wit for a monththe same set of nick-names has served the John Bull and Blackwood's Magazine ever since they started. It would appear by this that its essence consisted in monotony, rather than variety. Some kind of incongruity however seems inseparable from it, either in the object or language. For instance, admiration and flattery become wit by being expressed in a quaint and abrupt way. Thus, when the dustman complimented the Duchess of Devonshire by saying, as she passed, "I wish that lady would let me light my pipe at her eyes," nothing was meant less than to ridicule or throw contempt, yet the speech was wit and not serious flattery. The putting a wig on a stupid face and setting it on a barber's pole is wit or humor the fixing a pair of wings on a beautiful figure to make it look more like an angel is poetry; so that the grotesque is either serious or ludicrous, as it professes to exalt or degrade. Whenever any thing is proposed to be done in the way of wit, it must be in mockery or jest; since if it were a probable or becoming action, there would be no drollery in suggesting it; but this does not apply to illustrations by comparison, there is here no line drawn between what is to take place, and what is not to take place they must only be extreme and unexpected. Mere nonsense, however, is not wit. For however slight the connexion, it will never do to have none at all; and the more fine and fragile it is in some respects, the more close and deceitful it should be in the particular one insisted on. Farther, mere sense is not wit. Logical subtilty or ingenuity does not amount to wit (although it may mimic it) without an immediate play of fancy, which is a totally different thing. The comparing the phrenologist's division of the same portion of the brain into the organs of form and color to the cutting a Yorkshire pudding into two parts, and calling the one custard and the other plum-cake may pass for wit with some, but not with me. I protest (if required) against having a grain of wit.' * * Some one compared B- a tall, awkward country lout to Adam, who came into the world full grown, but without having ever made any use of his limbs. This was wit, though true; where then is the ingredient of incongruity? In altering the idea of Adam at pleasure, or from a mere possibility to make it answer a ludicious purpose Adam is generally supposed an active, graceful person: a lad grown up with large bones and muscles, with no more use of them than an infant, is a laughable subject, because it deranges or unhinges our customary associations. The threads of our ideas (so to speak) are strong and tightened by habit and will, just as we tighten the strings of a fiddle with pegs and screws; and when any of these are relaxed,snapped asunder, or unstrung by accident or folly, it is in taking up the odds and ends (like stitches let down) as they hang light and loose, and twisting them into some motley, ill-assorted pattern, so as to present a fantastic and glaring contrast to custom (which is plain sense) or the ideal, which strengthens and harmonizes (and which is poetry)-that the web of wit and humor consists. The serious is that which is closely cemented together by ex perience and prejudice, or by common sense: the ludicrous is the incoherent, or that which wants the cement of habit and purpose; and wit is employed in finding out new and opposite combinations of these detached and broken fragments (or exceptions to established rules) so as to set off the distinction between absurdity and propriety in the most lively and marked manner possible. Proof is not wanted here: illustration is enough, and the more extravagant the better; for the cause being previously condemned in our prosing judgments, we do not stand upon punctilio, but only wait for a smart, sly excnse to get rid of it; and hence tricking is fair in wit, as well as in war: where the justice of the cause is not the question, you have only to fight it out or make the best of the case you can. ESSAY III. ON MEANS AND ENDS. It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find things done, merely by wishing it? To put the will for the deed. is as usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense. There is in fact no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the will is not capable. This is, I think, more remarkable in the English than in any other people, in whom (to judge by what I discover in myself) the will bears great and disproportioned sway. We will a thing: we contemplatê the end intensely, and think it done, neglecting the necessary means to accomplish it. The strong tendency of the mind towards it, the internal effort it makes to give being to the object of its idolatry, seems an adequate cause to produce the effect, and in a manner identified with it. This is more particularly the case in what relates to the fine arts, and will account for some phenomena of the national character. The English school is distinguished by what are called ebauches, rude, violent, attempts at effect, and a total inattention to the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I think, proceeds not exactly from grossness of perception, but from the wilfulness of our character; our desire to have things our own way, without any trouble or distraction of purpose. An object strikes us: we see and feel the whole effect. We wish to produce a likeness of it; but we want to transfer this impression to the canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively, that is, to stamp it there at a blow, or otherwise we turn away with impatience and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end, and every attention to the mechanical part of art were a deviation from our original purpose. We thus degenerate, after repeated failures, into a slovenly style of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined an irregular impulse becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems strange that the love of the end should produce aversion to the means-but so it is; neither is it altogether unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are enamored of, is the general appearance and result; and it would certainly be most desirable to produce the effect in the same manner by a mere word or wish, if it were possible without entering into any mechanical drudgery or minuteness of detail or dexterity of execution, which though they are essential and component parts of the work, do not enter into our thoughts, and form no part of our contempla tion. We may find it necessary on a cool calculation to go through and learn these, but in so doing we only submit to necessity, and they are still a diversion to and a suspension of our purpose for the time, at least unless practice gives that facility which almost identifies the two together or makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus devours up the means, or our eagerness for the one, where it is strong and unchecked, is in proportion to our impatience of the other. We view an object at a distance that excites an inclination to visit it, which we do after many tedious steps and intricate ways; but if we could fly, we should never walk. The mind however has wings though the body has not, and it is this that produces the contradiction in question. The first and strongest impulse of the mind is to produce any work at once and by the most energetic means; but as this cannot always be done, we should not neglect other more mechanical ones, but that delusions of passion overrule the convictions of the understanding, and what we strongly wish we fancy to be possible and true. We are full of the effect we intend to produce, and imagine we have produced it, in spite of the evidence of our senses, and suggestions of our friends. In fact, after a number of fruitless efforts and violent throes to produce an effect which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to have produced it; if we have not commanded success, we have done more, we have deserved it; we have copied nature or Titian in the spirit in which they ought to be copied and we see them before us in our mind's eye; there is the look, the expression, the something or other which we chiefly aimed at, and thus we persist and make fifty excuses to deceive ourselves and confirm our errors, or if the light breaks upon us through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it; the greater the mortification the more violent the effort to throw it off, and thus we stick to our determination and end where we began. What makes me think that this is the process of our minds, and not mere rusticity or want of apprehension is, that you will see an English artist admiring and thrown into raptures by the tucker of Titian's mistress, made up of an infinite number of little folds, but if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds to omit all these details, and dash it off" by a single smear of his brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, but what is called jumping at a conclusion. It is, in a word, an overweening purpose, He sees the details, the varieties, and their effects and he admires them, but he sees them with a glance of his eye, and as a wilful man must have his way, he would reproduce them by a single dash of the pencil. The mixing his colors, the putting in and out, the giving his attention to a minute break, or softening in the particular lights and shades, is a mechanical and everlasting operation, very different from the delight he feels in contemplating the effect of all this when properly and finely done. Such details are foreign to his refined taste, and some doubts arise in his mind in the midst of his gratitude and his raptures, as to how Titian could resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, and whether it was not done by extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick, abridging the mechanical labor. No one wrote or talked more enthusiastically about Titian's harmony of coloring than the late Mr. Barry, yet his own coloring was dead and dry, and if he had copied a Titian, he would have made it a mere splash, leaving out all that caused his wonder or admiration, after his English or rather $* Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labor of beginning, but we give up, for the same reason, when we are near touching the goal of success; and to save a few last touches leave a work unfinished, and an object unattained. The immediate process, the daily gradual improvement, the completion of parts giving us no pleasure, we strain at the whole result; we wish to have it done, and in our anxiety to have it off our hands, say it will do, and lose the benefit of all our labor by grudging a little more, and not commanding a little patience. In a day or two, suppose, a copy of a fine Titian would be as complete as we could make it: the prospect of this so enchants us that we skip the intermediate days, see no great use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil it, and in order to have the job done, take it home with us, when we immediately see our error, and spend the rest of our lives in repenting that we did not finish it properly at the time. We see the whole of nature or of a picture at once; we only do a part: Hinc ille lachryma. A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious feeling, of this desire to grasp the whole of his subject, and anticipate his good fortune at a blow, of this massing and concentrating principle. He takes the thing more easily and rationally. Suppose he undertakes to copy a picture, he looks at it and copies it bit by bit. He does not set off headlong without knowing where he is going, or plunge into all sorts of difficulties and absurdities, from impatience to begin and thinking that " no sooner said than done,” but takes time to consider, lays his plans, gets in his outline and his distances, and lays a foundation before he attempts a superstructure which he may have to pull to pieces again. He looks before he leaps, which is contrary to the true blindfold English principle; and I should think that we had invented this proverb from seeing so many fatal examples of the neglect of it. He does not make the picture all black or all white, because one part of it is so, and because he cannot alter an idea he has once got into his head and must always run into extremes, but varies from green to red, from orange tawney to yellow, from grey to brown, according as they vary in the original: he sees no inconsistency or forfeiture of a principle in this, but a great deal of right reason, and indeed an absolute necessity if he wishes to succeed in what he is about. This is the last thing an Englishman thinks of: he only wants to have his own way, though it ends in defeat and ruin: he sets about a thing which he has little prospect of accomplishing, and if he finds he can do it, gives it over and leaves the matter short of success, which is too agreeable an idea for him to indulge in. The French artist proceeds bit by bit. He takes one part, a hand, a piece of drapery, a part of the back-ground and finishes it carefully, then another, and so on to the end. He does not from a childish impatience, when he is near the conclusion, destroy the effect of the whole by leaving some one part eminently defective, nor fly from what he is about to something else that catches his eye, neglecting the one and spoiling the other. He is constrained by mastery, by the mastery of common sense and pleasurable feeling. He is in no hurry, to finish, for he has a satisfaction in the work, and touches and retouches, perhaps a single head, day after day and week after week, without repining, uneasiness or apparent progress. The very lightness and indifference of his feelings renders him patient and laborious: an Englishman, whatever he is about or undertakes, is as if he was carrying a heavy load that oppresses both his body and mind, and which he is anxious to |