How little of the humour, which is always floating around and makes life and society enjoyable, ever gives pain to anybody; how few men there really are who, as it is said, would rather lose a friend than a joke. Most strokes are directed against imaginary persons, it is generally recognised that what seems wrong to one may seem right to another, and no man of common honesty can deny that he has often ridiculed others for faults which he would have committed himself. This confession might be well made by the most of our humorists. But although humour should not be offensive, it would be wrong to consider that its proper duty is to inculcate virtue. This is no more its office than it is that of a novel to give sage advice, or of a poem to teach science. Herein Addison's excellent feelings seem to have led him astray, for speaking of false humour he says that "it is all one to it whether it exposes vice and folly, luxury and avarice, or, on the contrary, virtue and wisdom, pain and poverty." From what he says, we might conclude that true humour was that which attacks vice, and false that which makes against virtue. But although it is good to have a worthy object, this has nothing to do with the quality of humour. We have less enjoyment of ridicule when it is directed against a virtuous man, but we also feel little when the principal element in it is moral instruction. There is no reason why we should view laughter at what is ludicrous as something objectionable. The more intelligent portion of the civilised world is not now amused at the real sufferings or misfortunes of others. If a man be run over in the street, and have his leg broken, we all sympathise with him. But some pains which have no serious result are still treated with levity, such as those of a gouty foot, of the extraction of a tooth, or of little boys birched at school. The actions of people in pain are strange and abnormal, and sometimes seem unaccountable; it is not the mere suffering at which any are amused. We can sometimes laugh at a person, although we feel for him, where the incentive to mirth is much stronger than the call for sympathy. Still we confess that some of the old malice lingers among us, some skulking cruelty peeps out at intervals. Fiendish laughter has departed with the Middle Ages, but what delights the schoolboy more than the red-hot poker in the pantomime? Wit is chiefly to be recommended as a source of enjoyment; to many this will seem no great or legitimate object, for we cannot help drawing a very useful distinction between pleasure and profit. The lines, "There are whom heaven has blessed with store of wit Yet want as much again to manage it; For wit and judgment ever are at strife, Though meant, each others, and like man and wife,"