Addison Arnold, M. Benson De Quincey Hamerton Harrison Hazlitt Howells Lamb Lang La Ramée Lowell Macaulay Mill Mitchell Montaigne Morley Pater Ruskin Sainte-Beuve Sidney Steele Stephen Stevenson Thackeray Thoreau Walton Warner White, G. HUMOR Humor is the most subtle of intellectual modes of expression. To define it and lay down its laws and principles is all but beyond human power. For it ranges from the inspired nonsense of Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" or the rough and ready gusto of Browne's "Showman's Courtship" to the airily intangible delicacy of Lamb's "Essays of Elia" and the venomous sarcasm of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Mere wit turns on an absurd similarity in words or ideas, as in Hood's lines: "They went and told the sexton, and The sexton tolled the bell." Yet the deepest humor is all but pathos; Don Quixote's demented visions of giants that prove to be windmills and of castles that turn out to be taverns provoke our laughter while they stir our pity. Humor would seem to depend, according to some, upon the association of ideas or circumstances that have no true relation to each other, as if they actually possessed a natural relationship. For this reason a cat or a cow dressed in coat and trousers provokes laughter, or a village bully described as a proud monarch causes a smile. An unexpected answer made as seriously as if it were appropriate is one of the commoner examples of the ludicrous. It is much for the same reason that actual misfortune may appear laughable, if the element of suffering is suppressed, as in Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories, or Gilbert's "Yarn of the Nancy Bell." Its very subtlety limits the appeal of humor. "One man's meat is another man's poison" applies more closely to this division of authorship than to any other. What tickles the fancy of one person, and more especially, one nation, may not afford even passing amusement to another. Englishmen find our comic papers dull, while many Americans see little to laugh at in "Punch." Barham Browne Carroll Cervantes Cowper Gilbert Harris Harte Holmes Hood Hope Irving Jerrold Jonson Lamb Lowell Richter Sheridan Sterne Swift FOR THE CHILDREN