last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else would be no very
hopeful task, perhaps; but those who have a keen perception of either
find no great difficulty in discriminating, as a matter of feeling,
between the two. And what is true of the qualities themselves is
true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the men by whom they have been most
conspicuously displayed. Some wits have been humourists also; nearly
all humourists have been also wits; yet the two fall, on the whole,
into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical
judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient
certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's
literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Molière,
Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely as these writers
differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader
would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all
is a catalogue of humourists. And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire,
Congreve, Pope, Sheridan, Courier, Sydney Smith--this, I suppose,
would be recognized at once as an enumeration of wits. Some of these
humourists, like Fielding, like Richter, like Carlyle, are always, or
almost always, humourists alone. Some of these wits, like Pascal,
like Pope, like Courier, are wits with no, or but slight, admixture
of humour; and in the classification of these there is of course
no difficulty at all. But even with the wits who very often give us
humour also, and with the humourists who as often delight us with
their wit, we seldom find ourselves in any doubt as to the real and
more essential affinities of each. It is not by the wit which he has
infused into his talk, so much as by the humour with which he has
delineated the character, that Shakspeare has given his Falstaff an
abiding place in our memories. It is not the repartees of Benedick and
Beatrice, but the immortal fatuity of Dogberry, that the name of _Much
Ado About Nothing_ recalls. None of the verbal quips of Touchstone