Of extreme laughter I know not in any annals a more satisfying example than one that is to be found in Moore’s Life of Byron. Both Byron and Moore were already in high spirits when, on an evening in the spring of 1818, they went ‘from some early assembly’ to Mr. Rogers’ house in St. James’s Place and were regaled there with an impromptu meal. But not high spirits alone would have led the two young poets to such excess of laughter as made the evening so very memorable. Luckily they both venerated Rogers (strange as it may seem to us) as the greatest of living poets. Luckily, too, Mr. Rogers was ever the kind of man, the coldly and quietly suave kind of man, with whom you don’t take liberties, if you can help it--with whom, if you can’t help it, to take liberties is in itself a most exhilarating act. And he had just received a presentation copy of Lord Thurloe’s latest book, ‘Poems on Several Occasions.’ The two young poets found in this elder’s Muse much that was so execrable as to be delightful. They were soon, as they turned the pages, held in throes of laughter, laughter that was but intensified by the endeavours of their correct and nettled host to point out the genuine merits of his friend’s work. And then suddenly--oh joy!--‘we lighted,’ Moore records, ‘on the discovery that our host, in addition to his sincere approbation of some of this book’s contents, had also the motive of gratitude for standing by its author, as one of the poems was a warm and, I need not add, well-deserved panegyric on himself. We were, however’--the narrative has an added charm from Tom Moore’s demure care not to offend or compromise the still-surviving Rogers--‘too far gone in nonsense for even this eulogy, in which we both so heartily agreed, to stop us. The opening line of the poem was, as well as I can recollect, “When Rogers o’er this labour bent;” and Lord Byron undertook to read it aloud;--but he found it impossible to get beyond the first two words. Our laughter had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could restrain it. Two or three times he began; but no sooner had the words “When Rogers” passed his lips, than our fit burst out afresh,--till even Mr. Rogers himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found it impossible not to join us; and we were, at last, all three in such a state of inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been of our party, I question much whether he could have resisted the infection.’ The final fall and dissolution of Rogers, Rogers behaving as badly as either of them, is all that was needed to give perfection to this heart-warming scene. I like to think that on a certain night in spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and (without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen to be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron and