But the ingredients of these evidently popular _Discourses_ bespeak the prevalent tolerance in the country of their birth, and on the Continent generally, for a robust freedom of tone and expression parallel with that which made jest-books cast in a similar mould acceptable to the early Englishman--not, perhaps, so much for the virtues which they inculcated, as for the pervading vein of comicality and diversion from severer reading. The old-fashioned school of humour, which the Continental _literati_ may be considered to have established, long survived its founders, and was still in a tolerably flourishing condition when Shakespear wrote. It did not die thoroughly out till the end of the last century; but the Georgian period in England saw the rise of a different taste and style, which largely resulted from constitutional and social changes in our system, and which gradually elbowed out of favour the archaic jocular spirit and the multitudinous _Ana_. To that revolution I shall have an opportunity of adverting presently; and I must now call attention to the collection of Old English Jest-Books which I edited in 1864. This was a fairly representative _Corpus_, embracing the best productions of the class, in all its varieties, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was advertised by the publishers as _Shakespear Jest-Books_, because Shakespear mentions one of them casually in one of his dramas; but the volumes seem to connect themselves with him in a more direct and sympathetic manner, when we examine them side by side with his own comic episodes and creations, and see how the old-world, quaint fun of the plays is in unison with that of the books. Both are emanations from the time; and they occupy a middle station between the Dutch school and our own. Shakespear and his fellow-dramatists placed upon the stage familiar types, employing familiar language; and the setters-out of jest-books and they had, commercially speaking, one mission--that of putting forward only what use had stamped current. There was still one remaining class of jest, which was once a very favourite form of pleasantry, and which, if it survives at all, survives under an altogether changed aspect. This is the Whimsical Invention, such as-- _The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham._ _The Sackful of News._ _Jack of Dover his Quest of Inquiry for the Veriest Fool in Christendom._ _Pasquil’s Jests, with Mother Bunch’s Merriments and a Brown Dozen of Gulls._