If it be the case that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it,” it is equally true that a pleasantry depends for its thorough success on the atmosphere in which it receives utterance, and on the personality of the narrator. Something which might seem racy and piquant to an Oriental, would very probably fall flat in an ancient Greek and Roman gathering; and it demanded all the surrounding costume of Greece or Rome to give salience and effect to those specimens of wit, which do not often, as they are recorded, strike us as remarkably brilliant. It is as if we put old wine into new bottles. The liquor is there; but the crust and the beeswing have vanished. So it is with the facetious heritage which comes to us from our own immediate ancestors. The substance and outline are with us; but the setting, the context, and the _genius loci_, are too frequently to be desired; and, besides, an editor has perhaps come upon the ground, and turned what was rough copy into a sentence or a paragraph “teres atque rotundus.” It becomes a readable article of sale; but it is a sort of handiwork, and no longer a spontaneous sally or a faithful report. On the other hand, it may happen that a jest bears upon some permanent incidence of human society, and passes with merely verbal changes from one age, one language, and one country, to another; like the episode mentioned by Lucian in his _Hetairai_ and likewise by Gellius, of the lady who, when her admirer sent her a cask of wine, commending its age, retorted that it was very small for its age,--where we observe that the conditions, being neither local nor temporary, are capable of universal and perpetual application. The reduction of pleasantries and satirical thrusts to form must be an outcome of topographical, climatic and social conditions, and is necessarily dependent on habits of life, pronunciation, diet, and dress--nay, on the most trifling minutiæ connected with national usages. The happiness of a witticism or of a taunt hangs on its relationship at some sort of angle to the customs and notions prevalent in a country. It exists by no other law than its antagonism or contrast to received institutions and matters of common belief; and hence what in one part of the world is apt to awaken mirth or resentment, in another falls flatly on the ear.