If the ironist is not cynic, neither is he merely a dealer in satire, burlesque and ridicule. Irony may be the raw material, innocent in itself but capable of being put to evil uses. But it involves neither the malice of satire, nor the horse-play of burlesque, nor the stab of ridicule. Irony is infinitely finer and more delicate and impersonal. The satirist is always personal and concrete, but the ironist deals with general principles, and broad aspects of human nature. It cannot be too much emphasized that the function of the ironist is not to make fun of people, but to give their souls an airing. The ironist is a judge on the bench, giving men a public hearing. He is not an aggressive spirit who goes about seeking whom he may devour, or a spiritual lawyer who courts litigation, but the judge before whom file all the facts of his experience, the people he meets, the opinions he hears or reads, his own attitudes and prepossessions. If any are convicted they are self-convicted. The judge himself is passive, merciful, lenient. There is judgment, but no punishment. Or rather, the trial itself is the punishment. Now satire is all that irony is not. The satirist is the aggressive lawyer, fastening upon particular people and particular qualities. But irony is no more personal than the sun that sends his flaming darts into the world. The satirist is a purely practical man, with a business instinct, bent on the main chance and the definite object. He is often brutal, and always overbearing; the ironist never. Irony may wound from the very fineness and delicacy of its attack, but the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the satirist and the burlesquer is to wound, and they test their success by the deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount of generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or a personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in neglected things.