The newspaper, highly respectable institution as it {336} undoubtedly is, entertains those in search of humorous enjoyment in other ways too. Its very standpoint as issuer of news leads to an amusing exaggeration of the importance of anything which happens to thrust its head up at the moment. An idea, aye and a fallacy too, old as the ages, will secure attention if only somebody with a name happen to bring it up anew. Whence comes the neomania which we see on all hands, the absurd exaltation of the latest novel and the rest. Yet more exhilarating to humorous inspection is the naïve assumption of the newspaper and its clients that everything happens in order to furnish them with news. I remember a paper, not of a low class, seriously contending, when a disagreeable _cause célèbre_ had to be re-tried, that, since everybody had made up his mind on the case, a new trial was most regrettable. The frank suggestion that the proceedings of our law courts have their final cause in the satisfaction of a craving for news in readers of journals was, doubtless, an editorial slip; yet the assumption is often discoverable to a penetrating eye. The point of view reminds one of the joyous antics of the Italian children who follow the cavalcade of the diligence and its “supplements” as it descends southwards to the level of the olive-groves, sure in their glee that the rattling procession, and the “soldi” too, have come for their delight. In view of the entertainment afforded by the press in these days, one may sometimes wonder whether the expression “comic journal” is not growing into a pleonasm. Humour will keep at our elbow, too, if we push deeper, and, lifting the wrappings of convention, insist on seeing the realities. The involutions of public utterance when, say, a dubious appointment has to be defended, are in themselves no less entertaining an exhibition of naïveté disclosed through elaborate wrappings than the romancings of a {337} naughty child beating about for an excuse. No kind of spectacle, perhaps, is more uplifting to a spirit given to the right sort of reflection, none too which has a larger promise of unwearying variation, than the wrigglings of the human mind when tangled in awkward appearances, and forced to find something which looks like a way of logical escape.