_The Question stated._--_Views of Locke and Dryden._--Under what circumstances, then, is the feeling of the ludicrous awakened? What is that certain peculiarity, or quality, of a certain class of objects, which constitutes what we call _the ludicrous_, objectively considered? Various answers have been given to this question, by writers not unaccustomed to the careful observation of mental phenomena. Mr. Locke's definition of wit is to this effect, that it consists in "putting those ideas together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, whereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy." This, it has been justly remarked, is too comprehensive, since it includes the entire range of eloquence and poetry. It comprends the sublime and the beautiful as well as the witty. It applies to the most facetious passages of Hudibras; it applies equally well to the most eloquent passages of Burke or Webster, and to many of the finest passages of Paradise Lost. Still more comprehensive is Dryden's definition, who says of wit, that it is a propriety of thoughts and words, or thoughts and words eloquently adapted to the subject, a definition which, it has been jocosely remarked, would include at once Blair's Sermons, Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, Cæsar's Commentaries, the Philippics of Cicero, and the funeral orations of Bossuet, as peculiarly witty productions. It should in justice be remarked, however, that neither Dryden nor Locke, in their use of the term wit, seem to have had in mind what we now understand by it, viz., facetiousness, or the mirth-provoking power, but rather to have employed the word in that more general sense, in which it was formerly almost exclusively used, to denote smartness and vigor of the intellectual powers, good sense, sound judgment, quickness of the apprehension, more particularly as these qualities are exhibited in discourse or in writing. _Definition of Johnson._--Johnson comes nearer the mark when he defines wit as "a kind of _concordia discors_, a combination of dissimilar images, a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike." Not much removed from this, if not indeed derived from it, is the definition of wit given by Campbell, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric--"that which excites agreeable surprise in the mind, by the strange assemblage of related images presented to it." To this, also, applies the same objection as to the preceding definitions, that it includes too much, the beautiful and sublime not less than the ludicrous, eloquence as well as wit.