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Updated: July 18, 2025
Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because they convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard to which we are all to some extent humourists.
Looking back over two centuries, we honour Chesterfield in that, unknown to himself, he also pleaded the cause of the greatest of English humourists.
There were, however, points of difference between these two humourists, which sometimes occasioned discord. The faith of Sir Arthur, as an antiquary, was boundless, and Mr.
IV. Roscoe's Memoir, compiled for the one-volume edition of Fielding, published by Washbourne and others in 1840. V. Thackeray's well-known lecture, in the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 1853. VI. The Life of Henry Fielding; with Notices of his Writings, his Times, and his Contemporaries. By Frederick Lawrence. 1855.
When the post returned, the conversation was back at Mr. Dishart. "Yes, lathies," Haggart was saying, "daftness about women comes to all, gentle and simple, common and colleged, humourists and no humourists. You say Mr. Dishart has preached ower muckle at women to stoop to marriage, but that makes no differ. Mony a humorous thing hae I said about women, and yet Chirsty has me.
Among other humourists, one might glance at a Jerrold, the chivalrous advocate of Toryism and Church and State; an a Beckett, with a lightsome pen, but a savage earnestness of purpose; a Jeames, whose pure style, and wit unmingled with buffoonery, was relished by a congenial public.
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.
All the great sceptics have been humourists. Humour is really a device to secure human comfort. Take me. I am inspired to become a preaching friar. I instantly perceive the funny side of setting out to be a preaching friar. I tell myself that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and that consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar.
Thackeray's best chapters, say in Vanity Fair, Esmond, the Humourists, contain an almost perfect prose style a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and scholarly not even Fielding's.
No sharper thrust was ever made at prince or potentate. The truth is that our love of a jest knows no limit and respects no law. We rather like being satirized by our own countrymen. We are very kind and a little cruel to our humourists. We crown them with praise, we hold them to our hearts, we pay them any price they ask for their wares; but we insist upon their being funny all the time.
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