Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/36

 any tinge from any human sentiment, the pleasure will be inaudible; and, if we produce a smile at all, it will be where the German constructed the idea of a camel,—in the depths of his consciousness; as when Voltaire said of the priests of his time, "Our credulity makes all their knowledge." But when an American poet, whose Pegasus had stepped upon his foot, said, "What a pity it is! my grandfather left to me his gout, and nothing in the cellar to keep it up with," a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind; it is so incongruously human to nurse our own infirmities.

So when Frederic the Great said spitefully to Minister Elliot, on occasion of the Te Deums over the reverses of Hyder Ali in India, "I never knew that Providence was one of your allies," and Elliot replied, "The only one, sire, whom we do not pay," both the remark and the retort involve the mind in a momentary adjustment of its ideas to the new suggestion; and the wit is thus restrained from sallying into laughter. We have to reflect that Elliot's repartee is a hit at all subsidized powers, including Prussia, and also at his own nation for its trick of futile gratitude and ascription of praise. But if any movement of sympathy prevents the act of wit from settling upon the internal organs, and bids it escape by every pore, we feel the dew of laughter on the face; as when Falstaff whimsically apologizes for himself, "Thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do, in the days of villany?"—or when, at a meeting in London to hear a report from some missionaries who had been sent to