It is, no doubt, difficult to supply a perfect demonstration of the fact of the intrinsic laughableness of each of these features. It has already been pointed out that in many of the most agreeable instances of the laughable different stimuli combine their forces. This is so much the case that it is sometimes difficult to decide which of the co-operating attributes is the most prominent. For example, the spectacle of the lackey donning the externals of a fine gentleman—a favourite subject of mirthful treatment by Molière and others—may amuse us as a transparent pretence, as a fine display of insolent vanity, or, again, as an amusing caricature of the extravagant absurdities of fine manners. Extravagance in dress and the like is frequently found in the company of a deliciously erroneous idea of one’s own importance. Intellectual naïveté may peep out at us and a moral naïveté look over its shoulder, as in the remark of a lady whom the astronomer Cassini had invited to see an eclipse, when she found that she had arrived too late: “M. de Cassini will be good enough to begin again for my sake”.[64] As I have remarked, the unfitting is in a large number of cases an introduction of something unworthy; as when a man at a dinner-party almost suggests something of an animal violence in his mode of eating, or an orator resorts to a “wooden” manner of speech or gesture, or when an unhappy simile hurls {115} the hearer into the lowest region of the commonplace, a proceeding satirised in the well-known lines from Butler’s _Hudibras_:— And like a lobster boil’d, the morn From black to red began to turn. As a last example of the many-sidedness of the laughable we may name affectation, particularly when it takes the form of aping another’s manners; for this may amuse us as a bit of acting seen through, or as an incongruous intrusion of a foreign element into the natural character of the imitator, or, again, as a weakness, a lack of intellectual or of moral initiative. Nevertheless, the appearance of cross-division in our scheme is really no objection to it. By collecting a sufficient number of instances, and noting how the presentation of a certain feature affects us when it is plainly the preponderant stimulus, and how it will continue to affect us in much the same way when its concomitants vary, we may satisfy ourselves that each of the aspects here named is effective as a provocative of laughter. It will be for experimental psychology, if ever its methods are competent to grapple with the subject, to make this clearer.