A “humorous” story is told of a coach coming into Dover at night, and the coachman, “feather-edging” a corner, running into a lamp-post. It was the period just after Waterloo. A little French count, who occupied the box-seat, was thrown off, and, falling on his side, had three ribs fractured. The coachman pulled up and asked a passing sailor to pick up the unhappy passenger. The half-drunken tar, seeing a heap of limp clothes on the pavement, said, “There’s no gemman here--on’y a lot of coats.” At that moment the Count groaned, “Oh! by gar! I brake tree rib.” “Damn your eyes!” roared the sailor, “you’re a Frenchman, are you? Lie there and be damned,” and so went on his way. I think the brutality of this tale is even more noticeable than its humour, but it is distinctly redolent of the age when people only laughed on seeing others placed in a painful or uncomfortable position. When no one was hurt there was no humour, according to the notions of that time--a time when to crush a man’s hat over his eyes was exquisitely funny, and for half a dozen lusty Toms and Jerrys to overturn a decrepit old watchman was a screaming farce. It is, by the way, significant that that was the era when screaming farces held the theatrical stage, and the rough-and-tumble of the harlequinade was at its zenith. The practical joker was then prominent, and the more “practical” (_i.e._ the more wantonly cruel and injurious) the joke the more it was applauded. If the victim ever thought of resenting a witticism of this kind, he was, in the cant of that period, “no sportsman,” and behind that formula the blackguard jokers screened themselves. If they had not very carefully, for their own protection, erected that obligation to “take a thing in good part” which stayed the heavy hand of revenge, it is quite likely that some of these humourists would have been very severely mauled. The amazing thing is that the victims agreed to that convention, and allowed themselves to be harassed with impunity.