Although the independent reading of the more thoughtful and studious had long brought them, of course, to a more enlightened inference, I almost apprehend that, until Mr. Wright’s volume on Grotesque and Caricature appeared, the loose general notion was that there was not much worth regarding in the present direction beyond the imperishable pages of Joe Miller; and I certainly think that a very narrow minority conceived in how wide and many-sided a meaning the Jest is susceptible of being understood. On the contrary, the Jest offers itself to our consideration in a surprising diversity of types and garbs; and the project which I have now before me is, in fact, an attempt to treat for the first time, in a catholic and critical spirit, a theme which has been usually viewed as frivolous and undignified. It is a matter of notoriety that some of our best antiquaries have loved to trace to their sources the comic and romantic tales which we have borrowed from the Continent, and to note the variations introduced for the sake of novelty, local requirement, or dramatic exigency, by a succession of writers in the same or in different languages. A vast amount of labour and scholarship has been expended in illustrating by this light the works of Shakespear and our other early playwrights, as well as in recovering the clues to the material on which Chaucer and Spenser built their undying productions. Moreover, both in England and abroad, a great deal has been achieved in elucidating the literary history of our ancient jest-books, and improving our intimacy with the true origin of the stories and their subsequent adventures, in more or less numerous disguises, from the _Hundred Merry Tales_ to _Joe Miller_ or what may perhaps be termed the _Milleriana_. But when one has assiduously sifted all this learning, one finds that it very naturally limits itself, as a rule, to the very early books, so far as _facetiæ_ are concerned,--to that branch of the subject which belongs to Archæology; and, in short, I do not know that I have been to any but the most trifling extent forestalled in the design which I here try to carry out, of arranging and analysing the humorous traditions which we have received from our forefathers touching the celebrities of all ages and countries, yet more exclusively those who flourished within a measurable distance of time, or those whom no distance of time is capable of affecting; or, once more, such relations as owe, not to the names, but to the matter, their continuity of life. The origin of all jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable; and it does not require the long establishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludicrous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment.