Before we draw the enticing inference that Dante was a paragon of wit, we shall, however, do well to verify our quotation from Aristotle, and to bear in mind the fact that the words “wit” and “witty,” like their companions “humour,” “humorous,” have changed their meaning since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By “Wit and Humour,” as applied to Dante, we mean something vague and general, yet sufficiently definite to make our quest practicable. The phrase is intended to cover the playful and fanciful use of the intellect upon literary material, in the broadest sense: from the simplest and most elementary puns and word-plays to the subtlest and most surprising analogies; from the most discursive description of a laughably incongruous situation, to the swift agility of brilliant paradox; from the quiet, genial sally of the man who laughs _with_ you; while he laughs _at_ you, to the biting sarcasm of the satirist, whose keen and often envenomed darts are winged with wrath and indignation. It is this last phase that we shall naturally expect to find most prominent in Dante. In so far as it is to be expressed by a single Aristotelian word, our subject corresponds most nearly in connotation to the Greek εὐτραπελία, that intellectual elasticity and adroitness which seizes instinctively upon the right subjects on which to vent its fun, and handles them with a sure, artistic touch. It stands midway between the vulgarity of the buffoon (βωμολόχος) and the insensibility to humour of the downright boor (ἄγροικος). Indeed, in one place (_Mag. Mor_, i. 31, 1193) this quality of εὐτραπελία is described by the Philosopher in terms which practically identify it with our own useful phrase, “A sense of humour.” “The vulgar buffoon,” he says, “deems everybody and everything a legitimate mark for a jest, while the boor has no will to jest himself, and to be jested upon makes him angry. The witty man”—the true humorist, as we may say—“avoids both extremes. He selects his subjects—and is not a boor. On the one hand he has the capacity of jesting with decency and decorum”—his jokes do not jar on our good taste—“and on the other, he can bear good humouredly jests of which he is himself the butt.”[90]