There is a great rage at present for the comic; and, to do justice to our own times, we think it may be said that wit was never more abundant--and certainly the pencil was never used with more genuine humour. But we cannot sympathise with, or much admire, that class of writers who seem to make the comic their exclusive study, who peer into everything merely to find matter of jest in it. Everything is no more comic than everything is solemn, in this mingled world of ours. These men, reversing the puritanical extravagance, would _improve_ every incident into the occasion of a laugh. At length one extreme becomes as tedious as the other. We have, if we may trust to advertisements, for we never saw the production itself, a _Comic History of England!_ and, amongst other editions of the learned commentator, _A Comic Blackstone!_ We shall be threatened some day with a _Comic Encyclopædia_; or we shall have these comic gentry following the track round the whole world which Mrs Sommerville has lately taken, in her charming book on Physical Geography. They will go hopping and grinning after her, peeping down volcanoes, and punning upon coral reefs, and finding laughter in all things in this circumnavigable globe. Well, let them go grinning from pole to pole, and all along the tropics. We can wish them no worse punishment. This exclusive cultivation of the comic must sadly depress the organ of veneration, and not at all foster any refined feelings of humanity. To him who is habitually in the mocking vein, it matters little what the subject, or who the sufferer, so that he has his jest. It is marvellous the utter recklessness to human feeling these light laughers attain to. Their seemingly sportive weapon, the "satiric thong" they so gaily use, is in harder hands than could be found anywhere else out of Smithfield. Nor is it quite idle to notice in what a direct barefaced manner these jesters appeal to the coarse untutored malice of our nature. If we were to analyse the jest, we should sometimes find that we had been laughing just as wisely as the little untaught urchin, who cannot hold his sides for "fun," if some infirm old woman, slipping upon the slide he has made, falls down upon the pavement. The jest only lasts while reflection is laid asleep. In this, as we have already intimated, lies the difference between the crowd of jesters and Charles Lamb. We quit their uproarious laughter for his more quiet and pensive humour with somewhat the same feeling that we leave the noisy, though amusing, highway, for the cool landscape and the soft greensward. We reflect as we smile; the malice of our nature is rather laid to rest than called forth; a kindly and forgiving temper is excited. We rise from his works, if not with any general truth more vividly impressed, yet prepared, by gentle and almost imperceptible touches, to be more social in our companionships, and warmer in our friendships.