How far Dante would satisfy the second part of this canon, may perhaps be open to discussion. But this is to anticipate. For the moment it behoves us to observe that a somewhat tedious search in the Berlin Index volume for the passage cited in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ reveals the fact that Burton’s “witty man” is not εὐτράπελος but εὔστοχος.[91] In other words, what Aristotle attributes to the melancholy temperament is inductive acumen, the qualification of the scientific discoverer, rather than a sense of humour. The two qualities have, however, something in common: the gift of seeing and grasping analogies not obvious to the plain man in his plain moments.[92] So this crumb of comfort may hearten us in our quest, although the path be at first sight as unpromising as were certain stages of the Poet’s mystical journey. If then we elect to follow Aristotle, as Dante followed Virgil (and I feel sure the Divine Poet would approve our choice of guide), we may draw one more drop of comfort from a passage in the _Endemian Ethics_,[93] in which the Philosopher, discoursing of friendship, notes how unlike characters often pair off together, “as austere people with witty ones (εὐτράπελοι).” May we look for this friendly union of playfulness and austerity within a single personality? in the redoubtable person of Dante Alighieri? Is it not almost as incongruous, it may be asked, to look for humour in the _Divina Commedia_ as it would be to search for jokes in the Bible? We are prepared to maintain that even the intense seriousness of Dante—that sublime and solemn earnestness which can only be compared to the temper of Holy Writ, is not merely compatible with a playful use of the intellect, artistically restrained, but is rendered more complete and effective thereby. And what about Holy Scripture itself? I speak with all reverence. Hebraists assure us that puns and plays on words are far from rare in the Old Testament; and there are, in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah,[94] and elsewhere, passages of which the irony, at once keen and sublime, cannot fail to strike the English reader. Would it not be possible also to quote even from the New Testament—from the Gospels—phrases and metaphors in which the deepest and most solemn truths are cast into a form which, for want of a better word, must be described as playful or witty? The picture of the children in the market place discontented with their games; the ironical description of the “blind guides of the blind”; and of the pedants who “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” the still more terrible irony of the “whited sepulchres”—instances like these show that Truth and Wisdom incarnate did not disdain to use the whip wherewith the old Hebrew Prophets had scourged the idolatrous follies of their contemporaries.[95]