grew—‘That they had nothing else to do’—was a quaint mixture of wit and humour, making it out as if they really led a lazy, laborious life; but there was here neither allusion or metaphor. Again, that master-stroke in Hudibras is sterling wit and profound satire, where speaking of certain religious hypocrites he says, that they ‘Compound for sins they are inclin’d to, By damning those they have no mind to;’ but the wit consists in the truth of the character, and in the happy exposure of the ludicrous contradiction between the pretext and the practice; between their lenity towards their own vices, and their severity to those of others. The same principle of nice distinction must be allowed to prevail in those lines of the same author, where he is professing to expound the dreams of judicial astrology. ‘There’s but the twinkling of a star Betwixt a man of peace and war, A thief and justice, fool and knave, A huffing officer and a slave; A crafty lawyer and pickpocket; A great philosopher and a blockhead; A formal preacher and a player; A learn’d physician and man slayer.’ The finest piece of wit I know of, is in the lines of Pope on the Lord Mayor’s show— ‘Now night descending, the proud scene is o’er, But lives in Settle’s numbers one day more.’ This is certainly as mortifying an inversion of the idea of poetical immortality as could be thought of; it fixes the _maximum_ of littleness and insignificance: but it is not by likeness to any thing else that it does this, but by literally taking the lowest possible duration of ephemeral reputation, marking it (as with a slider) on the scale of endless renown, and giving a rival credit for it as his loftiest praise. In a word, the shrewd separation or disentangling of ideas that seem the same, or where the secret contradiction is not sufficiently suspected, and is of a ludicrous and whimsical nature, is wit just as much as the bringing together those that appear at first sight totally different. There is then no sufficient ground for admitting Mr. Locke’s celebrated definition of wit, which he makes to consist in the finding out striking and unexpected resemblances in things so as to make pleasant pictures in the fancy, while judgment and reason, according to him, lie the clean contrary way, in separating and nicely distinguishing those wherein the smallest difference is to be found.[2]