"Hume, the historian, in examining a French manuscript containing accounts of some private disbursements of King Edward II. of England, found, among others, one item of a crown paid to somebody for making the king laugh. Could one conceive of a wiser investment? Perhaps by paying one crown Edward saved another. 'The most utterly lost of all days,' says Chamfort, 'is that on which you have not once laughed.' Even that grimmest and most saturnine of men, who, though he made others roar with merriment, was never known to smile, and who died 'in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole'--Dean Swift--has called laughter 'the most innocent of all diuretics.' Yet the philosopher of Concord, R. W. Emerson, is reported as having said in a lecture: 'Laughter is to be avoided. Lord Chesterfield said that after he had come to the years of understanding he never laughed.' Lord Chesterfield would have had far more influence if, instead of repressing every inclination to laugh, he had now and then given his ribs a holiday--nay, if he had even roared outright; for it would have disabused the public of the notion that he never obeyed a natural impulse, but that everything he said and did was prestudied--done by square, rule, and compass. As it was, though he was confessedly the politest, best-bred, most insinuating man at court, yet he was regularly and invariably out-flanked and out-maneuvered by Sir Robert Walpole, who had the heartiest laugh in the kingdom, and by the Duke of Newcastle, who had the worst manners in the world. In commending laughter, we mean genuine laughter, not a make-believe, not the artificial or falsetto laugh of fashionable society, nor, again, the mere smile of acquiescent politeness, or the crackling of thorns under a pot, or the curl of the lips that indicates in the laughter a belief in his fancied superiority. Still less do we mean the hollow, mocking laugh of the cynic. The laughter which we would commend as healthful is not bitter, but kindly, genial, and sympathetic."