The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they lay down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a jest offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any disposition to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused. An entertainment which promises to be funny is handicapped from the start. It has to plough deep into men’s risibilities before it can raise its crop of laughter. I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a man out of a cannon, the audience laughed convulsively; not because it found anything ludicrous in the performance, but because it had been startled out of its composure, and relieved from a gasping sense of fear. Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which had been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a married man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which seems to us to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not have been regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as amusing. Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted by hearing that an English gentleman had left his estate to his three sisters that he laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to a post (he was walking home through the London streets) to keep himself from falling to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw anything ludicrous in such a last will and testament. Sophocles makes Electra describe Clytemnestra as “laughing triumphantly” over the murder of Agamemnon; but Electra was a prejudiced witness. Killing an undesired husband is no laughing matter, though triumph over its accomplishment--when failure means death--is a legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a singularly august and composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and Electra inherit their nervous systems; and not on their testimony should we credit her with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and unbecoming.