Not being, then, properly in earnest,--that is, our conscience and our choice of moral good and evil being in a state of repose,--our language is happily contrived so as that it shall contain nothing to startle our sleeping conscience, if her ears catch any of its sounds. We still commend good and dispraise evil, both in the general and in the particular. But as good and evil are mixed in every man, and in various proportions, he who commends, the little good of a bad man, saying nothing of his evil,--or he who condemns the little evil of a good man, saying nothing of his good,--leads us evidently to a false practical conclusion; he leads us to like the bad man and to dislike the good. Again, the lesser good becomes an evil if it keeps out a greater good; and, in the same way, the lesser evil becomes a good. If we have no thought of comparing good things together, if our sovereign nature be asleep, then we shall most estimate the good to which we are most inclined; and where we find this we shall praise it, not observing that it is taking up the place of a greater good which the case requires, and, therefore, that it is in fact an evil. So that our moral judgments may lead practically to great evil: we may join with bad men and despise good; we may approve of qualities which, are, in fact, ruining a man; and despise others which, in the particular case, are virtues; without ever in plain words condemning virtue or approving vice. But, farther, this habit of never being in earnest greatly lowers the strength of our feelings even towards the good which we praise and towards the evil which we condemn. It was an admirable definition of that which excites laughter, that it was that which is out of rule, that which is amiss, that which is unsightly, (these three ideas, and other similar ones, are alike contained in the single Greek word [Greek: aischron],) provided that it was unaccompanied by pain. This definition accounts for the otherwise extraordinary fact, that there is something in moral evil which, in some instances, affects the mind ludicrously. That is to say, if moral evil affects us with no pain; if we see in it nothing, so to speak, but its irregularity, its strange contrast with what is beautiful, its jarring with the harmony of the system around us; then it does acquire that character which is well defined as being ridiculous. Thus it is notorious that trifling follies, and even gross vices, are often so represented in works of fiction as to be exceedingly ludicrous. It is enough, as an instance of what I mean, to name the vice of drunkenness. Get rid for the moment of the notions of vice or sin which, accompany it, and which give moral pain; get rid also of those points in it which awaken physical disgust; retain merely the notion of the incoherent language, and the strange capricious gait of intoxication; and we have then an image merely ridiculous, as much, so as the rambling talk and absurd gestures of the old buffoons.