“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him who hears it. Never in the tongue Of him who makes it.” in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ proves that Shakespeare understood the meaning and value of a sense of humor. Although it was at a much later date that the word humor came to be used as now, to mean a gentle, good-natured sort of fun. All types of humor are universal and of all time. But the first definitions were arrived at by the men of Greece and Rome, who were scholarly and analytical, hence the hair-splitting and meticulous efforts to treat it metaphysically. Humor today rarely is used in a caustic or biting sense,--that is reserved for wit. Which brings us to another great and futile question,--the distinction between wit and humor. There is not time or space to take up this subject fully here. But we can sum up the decisions and opinions of some few of the thinking minds that have been bent upon it. As the best and most comprehensive is the dissertation by William Hazlitt, most of this is here given. “Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation, and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view. Wit, as distinguished from poetry, is the imagination or fancy inverted and so applied to given objects, as to make the little look less, the mean more light and worthless; or to divert our admiration or wean our affections from that which is lofty and impressive, instead of producing a more intense admiration and exalted passion, as poetry does. Wit may sometimes, indeed, be shown in compliments as well as satire; as in the common epigram-- “‘Accept a miracle, instead of wit: See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.’