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Updated: June 18, 2025
Moreover while, as all true humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when necessary, she could, as is the case with them likewise, never quite discard the earnest.
Then Thackeray was coming over to lecture on The English Humourists. Nearly everybody went to reading him. Some because it was, as we should say now, a "fad;" others because they wanted to appear conversant with his works; and a few because they had learned to understand and to love the wonderful touches of the master-pen. Boston received him with open arms.
Leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy of maturer age. And now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the English humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it.
Hood and other light-minded humourists laughed at him for drinking bitter tea; but he was not to be shaken by ridicule. Miss Edgeworth voiced the conservative sentiment of her day when she objected to eating unsweetened custards; but he was not to be chilled by apathy.
If a chief of importance went to any of these assemblies he had in his train one or two humourists, who, by oddity in dress, gait, or gesture, or by lascivious jokes, tried to excite laughter. Boxing and fencing were common on festive days, and often led to serious quarrels. In fencing, they used the stalk of the cocoa-nut leaf as a substitute for a club.
"This art being of universal use, and in constant practice, has been ever since upon the improvement; and we may, I think, with good reason believe, is arrived at its greatest height and perfection, if it is not got beyond it, even to its declension; for whatsoever new, upstart, out-of-the-way messes some humourists have invented, such as stuffing a roasted leg of mutton with pickled herring, and the like, are only the sallies of a capricious appetite, and debauching rather than improving the art itself.
And every creature has a right to security from the banterings peculiar to the humourists of a succeeding age. To every century its own ironies, to every century its own vulgarities. In Steele's time they had theirs. They might have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would have been with a different rallying. Writers of the nineteenth century went about to rob her of her grace.
He will also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon History or Society are given to be capricious.
It was all in vain; the Boers incorrigible humourists would not be serious, or draw close enough to be shot at. It was suggested that the hooters told them a march was not to be stolen on us; hence so many postponements of the "fall" of Kimberley. The sound, the weirdness of the hooters in itself, would keep back a braver foe.
I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for ever an everlasting nose or rather, in one sense, does not hold but expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.
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