On the contrary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party to watch a quirk, or a merry conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial of poor human nature! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of it to sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavour of his venison upon the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. III.-THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST ![]() But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery quality. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief’s hand that grasps it. “Lightly come, lightly go,” is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. But the rogues of this world-the prudenter part of them, at least-know better and, if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discovered it. It is the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. ![]() The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence:-“Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson.” This was true distributive justice. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him-and does it. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. Harapha, in the “Agonistes,” is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Hickman wanted modesty-we do not mean him of Clarissa-but who ever doubted his courage? Even the poets-upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding-have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. A modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. The truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. ![]() These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. ![]() Some people’s share of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the same vocabulary. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to admit the truth of it.
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