It seems evident that one who is to probe the spirit of fun in man, and to extract its meaning, should have special qualifications. It is by no means sufficient, as some would seem to suppose, that he should be able to think clearly. He must couple with the gravity of the thinker something of the intellectual lightness and nimbleness of the jester. That is to say, he must be in warm touch with his theme, the jocose mood itself, realising his subject at once vividly and comprehensively by help of a rich personal experience. Now it cannot be said that those who have offered to teach us the secrets of laughter have commonly exhibited these qualifications in a conspicuous measure. It is a part of the whimsicality which seems to run through human affairs that the spirit of fun should be misunderstood not merely by the avowedly indifferent and the avowedly hostile, but by those who, since they offer to elucidate its ways, might be expected to have some personal acquaintance with it. The combination of a fine feeling for the baffling behaviour of this spirit with a keen scientific analysis, such as is found in Mr. George Meredith’s _Essay on Comedy_, seems to be a rarity in literature. This want of the familiar touch is especially observable in a good deal of the treatment of laughter by philosophic writers. It is not necessary to dwell on the sublime subtleties of the metaphysicians who conceive of the comic as a “moment” in the dialectic process which the æsthetic “Idea” {5} has to pass through. The account of the gyrations which the Idea has to describe, when once it passes out of that state of harmonious union with the sensuous image which we call “the beautiful,” reads strangely enough. Having, for reasons that are not made too clear, torn itself away from its peaceful companion (the image), and set itself up as antagonist to this in “the sublime,” the august Idea encounters the unpleasant retaliation of the image it has discarded in “the ugly,” where we see the determination of the injured party to defy its late companion; though, in the end, it revives from the “swoon” into which this rude behaviour of the image has plunged it, and recovers its legitimate claims—with which it would seem it was at the outset dissatisfied—in what we call “the ludicrous”. I have here tried to put the speculative subtleties of these Hegelian writers, so far as I am able to catch their drift, into intelligible English, and not to caricature them. Even favourable critics of these theories have found it difficult not to treat them with some amount of irony; and, so far as I am aware, no rehabilitator of Hegelian thought in England has as yet been bold enough to introduce to our insular mind a chapter of the sacred mysteries which, as they may well suspect, so easily lends itself to profane jesting.