But then the mode of paying it is playful and ironical, and contradicts itself in the very act of making its own performance an humble foil to another’s. Wit hovers round the borders of the light and trifling, whether in matters of pleasure or pain; for as soon as it describes the serious seriously, it ceases to be wit, and passes into a different form. Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference, or an ingenious and striking exposition of those evanescent and glancing impressions of objects which affect us more from surprise or contrast to the train of our ordinary and literal preconceptions, than from anything in the objects themselves exciting our necessary sympathy or lasting hatred. The favourite employment of wit is to add littleness to littleness, and heap contempt on insignificance by all the arts of petty and incessant warfare; or if it ever affects to aggrandise, and use the language of hyperbole, it is only to betray into derision by a fatal comparison, as in the mock-heroic; or if it treats of serious passion, it must do it so as to lower the tone of intense and high-wrought sentiment, by the introduction of burlesque and familiar circumstances. To give an instance or two. Butler, in his Hudibras, compares the change of night into day, to the change of colour in a boiled lobster. ‘The sun had long since, in the lap Of Thetis, taken out his nap; And, like a lobster boil’d, the morn From black to red, began to turn: When Hudibras, whom thoughts and aching ’Twixt sleeping kept all night, and waking, Began to rub his drowsy eyes, And from his couch prepared to rise, Resolving to dispatch the deed He vow’d to do with trusty speed.’ Compare this with the following stanzas in Spenser, treating of the same subject:— ‘By this the Northern Waggoner had set His seven-fold team behind the stedfast star, That was in Ocean waves yet never wet, But firm is fix’d and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wand’ring are: And cheerful chanticleer with his note shrill, Had warned once that Phœbus’ fiery car In haste was climbing up the eastern hill, Full envious that night so long his room did fill. At last the golden oriental gate Of greatest heaven ’gan to open fair, And Phœbus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair, And hurl’d his glist’ring beams through gloomy air: Which when the wakeful elf perceiv’d, straitway He started up and did himself prepare In sun-bright arms and battailous array, For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.’