When we cross over from an investigation of the older literature in order to make a general survey of the modern school, it is like the migration to a different climate. Something resembling an organic revolution has occurred in this sphere of action and ingenuity. New literary and theatrical agencies have been in operation. Great political convulsions and the overthrow of dynasties have made their secondary effects sensible. The Georges have turned everything upside down. Grandfather’s jest-book is equally out of date with his opinions and his costume. Joe Miller has won a victory more signal and more enduring than Blenheim. He is the jocular laureate of the new Hanoverian time, and of all time to come. His book, if he only knew it, is to see as many editions as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and to have as many readers as the Bible. He is to become in his way a colossus--a cyclopædia in himself. What more could the most aspiring solicit or desire? Soberly speaking, the appearance of _Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vademecum_, under fortuitous circumstances in the time of George II., marked the new era in this description of industry, and was an English Hegira. It was as if the jest-books of all prior epochs had been gathered unexceptionally up, and burned by the common hangman, to let the British community start afresh. So broad was the line of demarcation between the Old _régime_ and the New; and it is not difficult to see that this truly marvellous change is an evolution from novel phases and developments of social life, and was just what was to be anticipated. In this special way, perhaps, a more complete alteration had taken place since the Tudor period than has taken place between the last century and the present one; or, in other words, in the last hundred and fifty years. We cannot believe that an ordinary reader of Henry VIII.’s days would have had any relish or value for the fun of the earlier half of the eighteenth century; but an ordinary reader of the present time perfectly appreciates the anecdotes and humour--not exactly of the primitive lean _fasciculus_ to which _Joe Miller_ was at the outset limited, but of the wits who flourished under Walpole and side by side with Pope. This group of men, authors, actors, dandies, and _bons viveurs_--is the true lineal ancestry of Sheridan and Matthews, Sydney Smith and Jerrold; and, _mutatis mutandis_, the form, temper, and tone of the school have suffered no material variation, since its first rise into an immortal existence under the auspices of Miller within the genial precinct of Clare Market.