LAUGHTER—ITS TRAGEDY.
WE continually encounter some new sample of the varying and .discordant motives which move men to laughter, often the most jarring emanation of feeling. Nothing is more Zappy than laugh- ter—as the gayety of children ; nothing more wholesome—more " opening to the lungs," more renovating to the natural electricity.
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Nothing is more wise—as the laughter of the Silent Barber when he sees that the Hunchback is not dead ; nothing more brave—as the exultation of the Red Indian at the stake. Laughter may express the instinctive sense which jumps to profound conclusions —as it did in the party of Lascars and chimney-sweepers whom Hazlitt saw meet and burst with laughter : nature an art recip- rocally mirrored, and recognizing the parity of effect, laughed at the mutual counterfeit. There is wicked laughter, like that of the girl in the len, of Malta, who sets her rival lovers to kill each other ; or that of a crowd tickled by the grotesque kicks of a criminal on the gibbet. Nothing can be more humbling than the spectacle of laughter out of time and place : it exposes all the in- capacities of human nature—all its imperfect sense of what is ad- mirable or reverend. Perhaps the most pitiable of mistakes is a vapid joke pursuing the flippant tenour of its way into the midst of an abruptly-introduced grace. Among illustrious laughers is the British House of Commons : it makes a political engine of its diaphragmatic convulsions. It laughed when Mr. Disraeli appealed, the other day, to the com- mon faith of Jews and Christians in the Mosaic dispensation ; and it would be difficult so perfectly to analyze that laughter as to precipitate all the elements floating in it. The House laughed when Lord John Russell proposed the enhanced Income-tax, and, for the amusement of the House, discovered his own historical parallel in the Income-tax-enhancing Lord Grenville ; Lord John echoing the merriment—with a laughter of confession. Mr. An- stey commences the impeachment of. Lord Palmerston for high treason, and the faithful Commons laugh. There is nothing which the faithful Commons will not laugh at.
Before the great French Revolution, the brilliant and glowing saloons of Paris vibrated with laughter at the notion that " the people" had intentions of their own. Paris again resounds with the shouts of revolt ; blood and death are again familiar in the streets : a knot of heated gentlemen, profiting by the theatrical opportunity, enter the Chamber of Deputies to impeach the Minis- ter who has brought on the disaster—and he laughs ! How various these phienomena l and how striking the poverty of language, which has but one name for them all!
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