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"No one undergoes slight without feeling it, and I feel that I am slighted, though young, beautiful and virtuous. Now, can I keep from thinking this way? Can I control my anger at the thought that Adolphe is dining in the city without me? I take no part in his triumphs; I do not hear the witty or profound remarks made to others!
"Locked, I declare! Some of the witty tricks of the widow O'Connor, or the hoyden Miss Callwells!" "How I hate hoydens!" cried Lady Geraldine: "but let us take patience; they will be back presently. If young ladies must perform practical jokes, because quizzing is the fashion, I wish they would devise something new. This locking-up is so stale a jest.
I shall not trouble you, Sir, with the rest: being much after this witty rate, and to as much purpose. But we will go on, if you please, Sir! to the cunning Observations, Doctrines, and Inferences that are commonly made and raised from places of Scripture. One takes that for his Text, Psalm lxviii. 3, But let the righteous be glad.
The humorous story is strictly a work of art high and delicate art and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print was created in America, and has remained at home.
Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and upright, that he takes the heart by storm.
Not that his hearers would have followed any counsel even if he had been so misguided as to offer it; they did not come to hear him "preach" in the full sense of the word, they came to hear him "say things," -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour sharp polemics on the political situation or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while seemingly condemning viciousness.
Those new tables of the law, placed in the hands of the geologist by the same living God who spoke from Sinai to the Israelites of old, have remodelled the beliefs of half the civilized world. The solemn scepticism of science has replaced the sneering doubts of witty philosophers.
It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous, mediæval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers, the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing by the old.
The negro is not witty or consciously humorous, or epigrammatic. The humor of his actions and sayings lies very much in a certain primitive simplicity. Forbes couldn't tell, for instance, why he was amused at a remark he heard one morning in the store. A colored girl sauntered in, looking about vacantly. "You ain't got no cotton, is you?" "Why, of course we have cotton."
He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to meet and to know. Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off from any other population of the country. This sense is almost Latin in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood.
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