its effects on moral character are tremendous. That "hardened criminal," Mr. Balfour, might have been a good man instead of a "base brutal bully," if his name had only commenced with an X. He is a noteworthy martyr to the mania of the times. I am convinced that the Death of the Duke of Devonshire was accelerated by anxiety to please the sub-editors, and it is a source of real regret to me to reflect that my own death can afford them no supplementary gratification of this nature. [Sidenote: The Humorous] To start anything exclusively funny is a serious mistake. This was why poor Henry J. Byron's "Mirth" was so short-lived. It died of laughing. A friend of mine, with a hopeless passion for psychological analysis, says that the reason people do not laugh over comic papers is that the element of the unexpected is wanting. This, he claims, is the essence of the comic. You laugh over a humorous remark in the middle of a serious essay, over a witty epigram flashed upon a grave conversation, over the slipping into the gutter of a ponderous gentleman--it is the shock of contrast, the flash of surprise, that tickles. Now this explanation of why people do not laugh over comic papers is obviously wrong, because you are surprised when you see a joke in a comic paper; at the same time, it contains an element of truth. The books which gain a reputation for brilliance are those which are witty at wide intervals; the writer who scintillates steadily stands in his own light. [Sidenote: The Discount Farce]