been that Bank clerk," in Charles Lamb's Complaint
above quoted. There is almost infinite naiveté, in
the world. It is natural to children to be naive;
and perhaps, to a spectator raised sufficiently high
in knowledge and insight above them, all the sayings
and doings of men might appear so, a thought which
is sometimes expressed by poets and seems implied
in the words of Goethe Mephistopheles,

"Der kleine Gott der Welt bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,
Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag."

6. But humour as well as wit may be employed
under the influence of some emotion, and then it
becomes very difficult to distinguish the emotion
prompting and stimulating the representation from
that contained in the representations prompted, which
latter alone is properly humorous. Humour as well
as wit may become invective, repartee, or abuse; and
irony and sarcasm may thus be combined with wit
in the same flow of images and language. Prof. K.
Fischer in his Lecture "Schiller als Komiker" has
pointed out the close connection between the feeling
of indignation and humorous wit, instancing in Hot-
spur's first speech in Act i. Scene iii. Henry IV.
Part i. The strongest and gravest feelings become
thus combined with the most trivial and ludicrous,
pathos with absurdity; the source of pain and grief
becomes the source of mirth and laughter, and the
pain is relieved by this expression of it. The pro-
verb 'there is but a step from the sublime to the
ridiculous' is usually understood as meaning that
what one man thinks sublime, another, not under
the dominion of the same feelings, thinks ridiculous.
But in the cases before us the same person passes

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