good sense. And as humour had a correspondingly low signification, that of something above buffoonery, they and we are somewhat at cross purposes. With them, wit was the high thing that was to kill the lower. With us, humour is the nobler faculty, and, in the whirligig of time, it does seem to be yielding to the superior attractions of a so-called " wit." For humour, if it loses its moral quality, becomes, in fact, a debased form of wit. The "wit" of popular acceptation may be no longer the wit of Goldsmith's. He may rather be the wit of Pascal's definition, when that great thinker said, "Diseur de bons mots, mauvais caractère !"

I need not say that true humour is not dead, though it has to hold its own against many counterfeits. Some of the professors of the counterfeit kind have had the wit, or the grace, to recognise that what they offer needs some apology, for they have termed their production the new Humour," we may suppose in contrast with the old. But the old methods, let us be thankful, are still with us now with Mr. Anstey Guthrie, now with Mr. Henry James, now with the author of A Window in Thrums, now with Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when he allows the nobler and more genial side of him to have free course. Let us show our gratitude for the real thing in whatever form it comes, for it can do us nothing but good. Only remember that its true test is that it shall enlarge our sympathies, not narrow

them; that it shall make all mankind more important to us, and not merely our little cliques and coterics. Cultivated insolence-a jocular criticism of human nature, with no heart in it; -from this the continued study of our Chaucer, our Shakspeare, our Fielding, our Scott, our Miss Austen, and our Charles Lamb, and all the immortal and delightful band of the genuine humourists, alone will save us.

SIR GEORGE ROSE1

BUT for the circumstance that the word "wit" has so large a range of meanings, we might have been led to entitle this article "The Last of the Great Wits." For the distinguished lawyer and scholar whose name we have placed in its stead leaves behind him no one whose reputation for readiness and brilliancy of repartee seems likely ever to vie with his own. It is of this rare faculty that we propose to speak on the present occasion.

A memoir of the late Sir George Rose will doubtless appear in due course, in which full justice will be done to his memory as a lawyer, a scholar, and a much-valued friend. At present we confine ourselves to reproducing some samples of that ready wit or playful humour by which he had been famous for half a century to thousands in his own profession, but not, we believe, to any great extent beyond it. His good things were

1 [The Dictionary of National Biography states that he was born 1st May 1782, educated at Westminster School and Peterhouse, Cambridge; called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, 1809; in 1827 made K. C., and a Bencher of his Inn; knighted in 1837; and in 1840 made a Master in Chancery. He died 3rd December 1873.]

eagerly listened for and rapidly circulated in Bar circles; but they did not pass into society at large in any degree proportionate to their merit. Many of them, indeed, had a more or less pronounced legal flavour, and some were too purely technical to be understood by the uninitiated; but, setting these aside, there yet remain a number which appeal at once to a much larger audience.

To praise beforehand the excellence of a story that one is about to tell is notoriously a perilous course, and the same thing might be said of a preliminary eulogy upon a collection of such stories. But before proceeding to cite a few of Sir George Rose's bons mots, it may be allowed us to call attention to some of their leading characteristics. In the first place, their singular promptness will strike the reader. The mental rapidity with which the retort follows upon the question or remark which provokes it is one of the most striking of the surprises to which the pleasure derived from wit has been attributed by the metaphysician. In the case of nine out of ten of the anecdotes of Sir George Rose, the wit of his reply must have been, from the very nature of the case, generated upon the spot. Again, though the wit is to a great extent verbal, the pleasure which it affords is but slightly due to the mere happy ingenuity by which words are tortured. The pun is rather the vehicle for the wit, than the wit itself. There is a prejudice, and a natural one, against punning and punsters. The simple

play upon words is so easy, that it is sure to be resorted to by persons of no real humour, imagination, or mental vigour of any kind. But in the hands of a man of genius-a Hood, a Lamb, or a Sydney Smith-the play upon words invariably involves a play upon ideas, and often in consequence suggests feelings of admiration and delight different in kind, as well as degree, from those produced by analogies or discordances merely verbal. The word-quibble is lost and forgotten in the glow and warmth of the envelope of humour or sentiment in which it is enwrapped. In short, when the pun is the result of mere quickness in detecting analogies between words, it soon becomes tiresome and painful; where, on the other hand, it is the suggestion of true humour, it partakes of its originating force, and is itself instinct with humour. It is something more than the ingenuity or the promptness of Sir George Rose's puns that affords delight; it is that which, for want of a better word, we may call their "drollery." They may be far-fetched, or even, on the other hand, may be based upon verbal analogies that have been often seized upon and made use of by jokers in all times; but in the particular use made of his material, Sir George never failed to be amusing. Some of his legal jokes turned, as we have said, upon legal phraseology which is quite unintelligible to the outside world. A few of the less abstruse, however, may be cited here. When, some years ago, the practice of having daily prayers

VOL. II

S