The ludicrous and grotesque are, to a certain extent, relative or conditional terms. The canons of propriety and right in primitive life are so widely different from those which prevail in a state of civilisation, that what we should regard as fit material for a jest-book is elsewhere treated as a piece of serious history. A departure from the line of expression or deportment sanctioned by common usage has proved in all countries and all ages a fertile source of satire and caricature; but then that line, like the needle, is subject to variation, and the fixture of character is not, as is the case with straight and curved lines in mathematics, a matter of doctrine and fact, but one mainly of local circumstance and costume. The joke has proved in all ages a factor of manifold power and use. It has ridiculed and exposed corruptions in the body politic and in the social machinery. It has laughed at some things because they were new, and at others because they were old. It has preserved records of persons and ideas, and traits of ancient bygone manners, which must otherwise have perished; and it frequently stands before us with its esoteric moral hidden not much below its ostensible and immediate purport. Jests present humanity to our observation in its holiday attire, its Sunday best, or at least under some exceptional and temporary aspect. Quin and Foote, Mathews and Sydney Smith, Frank Talfourd and Henry Byron, had their grave, and very grave, intervals. Hood himself said that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood; and it was mournfully true, as the records of his every-day life, chastened by illness and sorrow, only too well establish. The pleasant or comic episodes may be an occasional incidence of the least happy existence or the least fortunate career; and the anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, of celebrated men and women are receivable with allowance as traits of character and conduct, for which some special circumstance, or a union of circumstances, is answerable. In the general tenor of the most favoured experiences the serious element is apt to preponderate; the heyday of our years is like short, intermittent sunshine; and we ought to come to the study of ANA, if we wish to judge them correctly, with a recollection of what they are, and also what they are not. They who have enjoyed the privilege of a personal acquaintance with the gayest of our modern humourists--and there are many such (including the present writer) among us still--are best qualified to pronounce an opinion upon this point; and they know how much of darkness and anguish often there is behind the scenes or off the boards. The jokes by or about any given individual do not, after all, amount to a great deal, when they are spread over thirty or forty years: all the genuine sayings of Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold would not fill more than a few octavo pages; and these things are to be taken, not as indices