After mentioning, as a generally accepted thing, the deficiency of the comic element in Demosthenes, and the superabundant quantity and inferior quality of it in Cicero (it must be remembered that Quintilian had the Tullian _Three Books of Jests_, which time has mercifully hidden from us), he passes to the general question, and accepts the almost universal classical opinion that laughter has always something low about it.[384] In this, we know, Plato and Aristotle both agreed; it was a sort of postulate of all Greek philosophy, and though almost certainly false, was excused, partly by the extreme licence of the Comic Muse in ancient times, and partly by the rarity of humour in the best sense, and the almost non-existence of Romantic Comedy. He observes, however, acutely enough, on the insufficiency of the general explanations of the origin of laughter (an insufficiency which has certainly not been filled up to the present day), and shows that urbane shrewdness, which is one of his best points, by questioning whether deliberate cultivation of jesting as an art is an altogether satisfactory thing. But it is in his subsequent remarks on the kind of jesting admissible in oratory (we might here at least substitute, with hardly any wrong, “in literature”) that his chief merit lies. On the dangerous business of verbal distinction between _venustum_, _salsum_, _facetum_ he is luminous and useful; while his remarks, in two different places, on _urbanitas_ are not far from a _locus classicus_, and those[385] on the special treatise of Domitius Marsus on that topic have the best qualities of a review—that is to say, of the kind of review that one sees too seldom. Footnote 384: _Hoc semper humile._