to the habitual unbroken mood of the man, but rather as samples of felicity of phrase or thought to be gotten, like mineral ore, under auspicious conditions from a wealthy soil. We are too grossly subservient to habit and use. We naturally accustom ourselves, unless we reflect, to figure the clown with his tongue perpetually in his cheek and the wit discharging his shafts without cessation or repose--just as, on the contrary, no one would be prepared to believe, without the strongest proof, that a tailor had made a pun, or that a railway porter had written a Greek epigram. If we try to realise in our imagination Grimaldi stretched on a bed of sickness, a jovial companion in a gouty paroxysm, or an excellent friend, the author of utterances which have delighted and convulsed the stage, in the extremity of mental depression or physical suffering, we shall be better able to see that the Anecdote generically, and the Jest in particular, are fortuitous emanations and not parcel of our daily being. Facetious narrations are too seldom subjected to the test of circumstantial evidence. We are not apt to ask ourselves the question, who delivered the joke, or ushered it into print? There are cases, of course, where the author of a sally or rejoinder himself repeats it to a third party, possibly in its original shape, possibly with embellishments; but there must be, nay, there are numberless instances in which a funny thing is given to a person, not because he said it, but because he might or would have done so. It is an assignment by inference and likelihood. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. ORIGIN OF THIS CLASS OF LITERATURE, AND ITS DEPENDENCE ON THE CONDITIONS OF SOCIETY--JESTS BEFORE JEST-BOOKS--INFLUENCE OF THE ARTS OF WRITING AND PRINTING LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE INTRODUCTION OF CARICATURE AND HUMOUR. The earliest form or phase of the JEST was the product of an illiterate age. A knowledge of the art of writing was a discovery long subsequent to the rise of a taste for the expression of the laughable, for the sake either of amusement or of ridicule. The primitive authors of jokes were men who employed, not the pen, but the chisel and the brush; and the most venerable existing specimens of this branch of human ingenuity belong to art, not to literature; and to Egypt, the cradle and nursery of art. In his admirable _History of Caricature and Grotesque_, 1865, Wright has accumulated such an immense body of information on this most interesting subject of inquiry that, so far as it goes, it will supersede the necessity for traversing the ground again. He has traced with singular industry and scholarship the growth and development of the jocular sentiment in all its varied points of view, from its first infancy among the Egyptians, through the Greeks and Romans, to modern times and our own country.