As with the topsy-turvyness of momentary situation, so with more permanent incongruities between character and surroundings. In this case a more special gift of humorous insight is needed; for to the many what lasts grows seemingly right by its mere durability. You may make a highly unsuitable person a bishop, or the editor of a comic journal, and you will find that, for most onlookers, time will soon begin to invest the position with a sort of suitability. Even an ill-matched connubial pair will take on something of mutual appropriateness through this influence of the customary on human judgments. But the eye of the humorous onlooker, guided by ideas, entertains itself with stripping off the trappings of convention and use. This humorous quizzing of the characters and of the revealed mental processes of those about us has grown, in the case of a few, into a chief pastime. The development in these days of a keener interest in character, which is partly reflected in, partly the product of, modern fiction, has led these few to something like a sustained and methodical survey of their acquaintances and their friends, in which the quiet laughter of the humorist may find ample room. A part of the temperate mirth in this case springs out of the delightful surprises—the result of the complexity of organic {319} products and of the limitations of our powers of prediction. The appearance of a moral metamorphosis when a man comes under the influence of some new force, say a wife, or the invasion of his social world by a war-craze, may amuse a humorous observer much as the semblance of a physical transformation amuses him. In this habitual contemplation by a humorous person of those he knows, there is, evidently, a blending of amusement with kindly interest. That is, indeed, the note of much of the “psychologising” at which many, instructed by the best fiction, now try their hand. The combination of the playful with the respectful attitude is nowhere more plainly seen than in our new estimates of diversity of character and of individuality. The contemplation of the result of some new experiment of nature in the variation of the human type, will always bring something of the gaiety which is provoked by the sight of a fresh oddity; yet our new regard for individuality, as discriminated from eccentricity, brings down the mirthful utterance to the low tones of humour.