There is nothing which contributes so much to ease social intercourse as the jest. In comparison with it, the proverb is only a humble subordinate, and song itself, with all its power, but a weak influence. Yet the song and the proverb boast a critical literature, while the brief compendiums of merriment which never die, which, once written, live through every age, and force their way through every penetrable language, are undoubtedly less studied than any other popular medium of feeling. What is a jest? It is as little worth the while to try to define its nature, as it is to analyze wit. We all know that the world laughs, and what it laughs at, and what the droll saws, anecdotes, rhymes, quips, and facetiae are, which give fame to a Bebel, or a Frischlin, a Tom Brown, and a Joseph Miller. Leave labored analysis to the philosophers, contenting ourselves with remarking that a jest is a laugh candied or frozen in words, and thawed and relished in the reading or utterance. And laughter? When a man is too lazy to think out an idea, and yet too active to dreamily _feel_ it, he laughs. When he catches its leading points, and yet realizes that behind them remains the incomprehensible or incongruous, he settles it for the nonce with a smile. Hence it comes that we laugh so seldom with all our heart, a second time over a jest. It has been _comprehended_; the mystery, the sense of contradiction and incongruity, has vanished--we may revive it in others, and laugh electrically with them; but the first piquant gusto of _its_ spice is gone forever. Yet the jest, like the proverb, acquires a value by becoming current. It often illustrates an opinion or an experience, and when it is much worn, it may still gain a new point, by being brought into illustrative relation with some event or idea. Esop's fables, or any fables, are, after all, only good jokes in a narrative form, which owe their fame simply to their boundless capacity for application. Sidney Smith's story of Mrs. Partington, who tried to mop out the Atlantic, was a jest, and so too was Lady Macbeth's 'cat i' the adage,' who wanted fish, yet would not wet her paws, and let 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would.' _Something_ of our old enjoyment of a joke for the first time, always lingers around it, and we gladly laugh again--for, 'old love never quite rusts out.' And there are many jests, which, owing to their boundless variety of application, always come before us in a new light. Such are those which illustrate character. Woe to the man among the vulgar, who once becomes the scape-goat of a story on the subject of a joke-anecdote which 'shows him up.' Woe in truth, if it grow to a nickname--for then he, of all persons, learns that there are jests which never lose their sting.