Although Wit and Humour are often used as synonymous, the fact of two words being in use, and the attempts which have been made to discriminate between them, prove that there must be a distinction in signification.[25] It is so fine that many able writers have failed to detect it. Lord Macaulay considered wit to refer to contrasts sought for, humour to those before our eyes--but such an explanation is not altogether satisfactory. Humour originally meant moisture, or any limpid subtle fluid, and so came to signify the disposition or turn of the mind--just as spirit, originally breath or wind, came to signify the soul of man. In Ben Jonson's time it had this signification, as in one of his plays entitled "Every Man in his Humour." Dispositions being very different, it came to signify fancy--as where Burton, author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," is called humorous--and also the whimsical Sir W. Thornhill in the "Vicar of Wakefield"--and finally meant the feeling which appreciates the ludicrous, though we sometimes use the old sense in speaking of a good-humoured man. Wit is a Saxon word, and originally signified Wisdom--a witte was a wise man, and the Saxon Parliament was called the Wittenagemot. We may suppose that wisdom did not then so much imply learning as natural sagacity, and came to refer to such ingenious attempts as those in the Exeter Book. Here would be a basis for the later meaning, especially if some of the old saws came to be regarded as ludicrous, but for a long time afterwards wit signified talent, whether humorous or otherwise, and as late as Elizabeth the "wits" were often used as synonymous with judgment. Steele, introducing Pope's "Messiah" in the Spectator, says that it is written by a friend of his "who is not ashamed to employ his wit in the praise of of his Maker." Addison introduced the word genius, and the other was relegated to humorous conceits--a change no doubt facilitated by the short and monosyllabic form and sound. The word _facetus_ seems to have undergone the same transition in Latin, for Horace speaks of Virgil having possessed the _facetum_ in poetry.