by contrast.

It is lessening and undermining our faith in any thing (in which the serious consists) by heightening or exaggerating the vividness of our idea of it, so as by carrying it to extremes to show the error in the first concoction, and from a received practical truth and object of grave assent, to turn it into a laughing stock to the fancy. This will apply to Archer and the lady's garter, which is ironical: but how does it connect with the comparison of Hudibras's beard to a tile, which is only an exaggeration; or the Compagnons d'Ulysse, which is meant for a literal and severe truth, as well as a play upon words? More generally then, wit is the conjuring up in the fancy any illustration of an idea by likeness, combination of other images, or by a form of words, that being intended to point out the eccentricity or departure of the original idea from the class to which it belongs does so by referring it contingently and obliquely to a totally opposite class, where the surprise and mere possibility of finding it, proves the inherent want of congruity. Hudibras's beard is transformed (by wit) into a tile: a strong man is transformed (by imagination) into a tower. The objects, you will say, are unlike in both cases; yet the comparison in one case is meant seriously, in the other it is

merely to tantalize. The imagination is serious, even to passion, and exceeds truth by laying greater stress on the object; wit has no feeling but contempt, and exceeds truth to make light of it. In a poetical comparison there cannot be a sense of incongruity or surprise; in a witty one there must. The reason is this: It is granted stone is not flesh, a tile is not hair, but the associated feelings are alike, and naturally coalesce in one instance, and are discordant and only forced together by a trick of style in the other. But how can that be, if the objects occasioning these feelings are equally dissimilar?-Because the qualities of stiffness or squareness and colour, objected to in Hudibras's beard, are themselves peculiarities and oddities in a beard, or contrary to the nature or to our habitual notion of that class of objects; and consequently (not being natural or rightful properties of a beard) must be found in the highest degree in, and admit of, a grotesque and irregular comparison with a class of objects, of which squareness and redness * are the essential characteristics (as of a tile), and which can have, accordingly, no common point of union in general qualities or feeling with the first class, but where the ridicule must be just

* A red beard is not uncommon, but it is odious.

and pointed from this very circumstance, that is, from the coincidence in that one particular only, which is the flaw and singularity of the first object. On the other hand, size and strength, which are the qualities on which the comparison of a man to a tower hinges, are not repugnant to the general constitution of man, but familiarly associated with our ideas of him: so that there is here no sense of impropriety in the object, nor of incongruity or surprise in the comparison all is grave and decorous, and instead of burlesque, bears the aspect of a loftier truth. But if strength and magnitude fall within our ordinary contemplations of man as things not out of the course of nature, whereby he is enabled, with the help of imagination, to rival a tower of brass or stone, are not littleness and weakness the counterpart of these, and subject to the same rule? What shall we say, then, to the comparison of a dwarf to a pigmy, or to Falstaff's comparison of Silence to "a forked radish, or a man made after supper of a cheese-paring?" Once more then, strength and magnitude are qualities which impress the imagination in a powerful and substantive manner; if they are an excess above the ordinary or average standard, it is an excess to which we lend a ready

and admiring belief, that is, we will them to be if they are not, because they ought to bewhereas, in the other case of peculiarity and defect, the mind is constantly at war with the impression before it; our affections do not tend that way; we will it not to be; reject, detach, and discard it from the object as much and as far as possible; and therefore it is, that there being no voluntary coherence but a constant repugnance between the peculiarity (as of squareness) and the object (as a beard), the idea of a beard as being both naturally and properly of a certain form and texture remains as remote as ever from that of a tile; and hence the double problem is solved, why the mind is at once surprised and not shocked by the allusion; for first, the mind being made to see a beard so unlike a beard, is glad to have the discordance increased and put beyond controversy, by comparing it to something still more unlike one, viz. a tile; and secondly, squareness never having been admitted as a desirable and accredited property of a beard as it is of a tile, by which the two classes of ideas might have been reconciled and compromised (like those of a man and a tower) through a feeling or quality common (in will) to both, the transition from one

to the other continues as new and startling, that is, as witty as ever;-which was to be demonstrated. I think I see my way clearly so far. Wit consists in two things, the perceiving the incongruity between an object and the class to which it generally belongs, and secondly, the pointing out or making this incongruity more manifest, by transposing it to a totally different class of objects in which it is prescriptively found in perfection. The medium or link of connexion between the opposite classes of ideas is in the unlikeness of one of the things in question to itself, i. e. the class it belongs to: this peculiarity is the narrow bridge or line along which the fancy runs to link it to a set of objects in all other respects different from the first, and having no sort of communication, either in fact or inclination, with it, and in which the pointedness and brilliancy, or the surprise and contrast of wit consists. The faculty by which this is done is the rapid, careless decomposition and recomposition of our ideas, by means of which we easily and clearly detach certain links in the chain of our associations from the place where they stand, and where they have an infirm footing, and join them on to others, to show how little intimacy they had with the former set.