to any exhibition of emotion. It has been said that Diogenes never laughed, and the same has been asserted of Swift. And although we may safely conclude that these statements were not literally true, there was probably some foundation for them. No doubt they appreciated humour, but their minds were earnest and ambitious. Moreover, great wits are accustomed to the character of their own humour, and are often merely repeating what they have heard or said frequently. Nature has endowed few men with two gifts, and emotional joyousness and high intellectual culture form a rare combination, such as was found in Goldsmith with his hearty laughter, and in Macaulay, who tells us that he laughed at Mathews' comic performance "until his sides were sore." Bishop Warburton said that humorists were generally men of learning, but although those who were so would have been most prominent, we scarcely find the name of one of them in the course of these volumes; many of those mentioned sprang from the humbler paths of life, but all were men of study. Still those who are altogether unable to enjoy a joke are men of imperfect sympathies. Charles Lamb observes that in a certain way the character, even of a ludicrous man, is attractive--"The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he gives you that he will not betray or over-reach you. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. What are commonly the world's received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy?"