Best of all, laughter of the genial sort carries with it, and helps to develop, kindly feeling and the desire to please. It is too often forgotten that a mirthful spirit, though it may offend, is a large source of joy to others. He who produces a laugh of pure gladness brightens the world for those who hear him. Fertility in jests may qualify a man to become one of the human benefactors; and it has been claimed for Falstaff, with some reason, that he “has done an immense deal to alleviate misery and promote positive happiness”.[337] It is this implied wish to entertain which gives to laughter much of its value as an educator of the sympathies. Nothing, indeed, seems to promote sympathy more than the practice of laughing together. Family affection grows in a new way when a reasonable freedom is allowed to laugh at one another’s mishaps and blunders. One reason for this, perhaps, is that the consciousness of our having laughed at our friends and been laughed at by them, without injury to friendship, gives us the highest sense of the security of our attachments. When a friend laughs “as love does laugh”—to quote Mr. Meredith’s Rosamund—with the laugh which only half-hides a kindly sentiment, say, a wish to help you to laugh away what will vex or harm you, it binds hearts yet more securely. Even our comparatively solitary laughter at things, when no appreciative sharer is at hand, {418} may, if only it has the tolerant good-natured tone, connect itself with and bring into play the sympathetic side of us. If there is in laughter this element of a deeper humanity, we shall do well to view jealously any undue imposition of restraints. The history of popular mirth points to the dangers of this. That some regulation of the impulse, both external by social pressure and internal by a man’s own self-restraint, is required, does not need to be argued. The laughing impulse, when unchecked, has taken on ugly and deadly forms. If men have endowed their deities with mirth they have also endowed their fiends. Society is right in her intuitive feeling that an unbridled laughter threatens her order and her laws. Specific injuries done by ribald jests, _e.g._, to religious convictions, may have to be dealt with by the magistrate. This all men know, as also that society acts wisely when she seeks to maintain the dignity of social converse by putting down with a gentler hand all unworthy and unbecoming laughter, and to observe vigilantly the “hypergelast”—a species that includes others besides Aristotle’s low jesters (βωμόλοχοι)—who, if he does not, either maliciously, or through sheer heaviness and awkwardness of gait, kick sharply against some sensitive place, will at least weary decent men with all the weariness of the bore and something more.