The portrait of the author prefixed to the present edition has been engraved by M. AMAND DURAND, from a sketch made by Mr. GEORGE REID, R.S. A., in February 1882. JOHN LEECH. 'John Leech was an absolute master of the elements of character; of all rapid and condensed realisation ever accomplished by the pencil, his is the most dainty and the least fallible in the subjects of which he was cognisant, not merely right in the traits which he seizes, but refined in the sacrifice of what he refuses.— MR. RUSKIN, in a letter to Miss Leech on her brother's drawings. IF JOHN LEECH. F man is made to mourn, he also, poor fellow ! and without doubt therefore, is made to laugh. He needs it all, and he gets it. For human nature may say of herself in the words of the ballad, 'Werena my heart licht, I wad dee.' Man is the only animal that laughs; it is as peculiar to him as his chin and his hippocampus minor.1 The perception of a joke, the smile, the sense of the ludicrous, the quiet laugh, the roar of laughter, are all our own; and we may be laughed as well as tickled to death, as in the story of the French nun of mature years, who, during a vehement fit of laughter, was observed by her sisters to sit suddenly still and look very 'gash' (like the Laird of Garscadden2), this being considered a further part of the joke, when they found she was elsewhere. In books, old and new, there is no end of philosophising upon the ludicrous and its cause; from 1 Professor Turner informs me that this comfort is taken from us, the superior apes have the lesser sea-horse. 2 Vide Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences. Aristotle, who says it is some error in trutn or propriety, but at the same time neither painful nor pernicious; and Cicero, who defines it as that which. without impropriety, notes and exposes an impropriety; to Jean Paul, who says it is the opposite of the sublime, the infinitely great, and is therefore the infinitely little; and Kant, who gives it as the sudden conversion into nothing of a long raised and highlywrought expectation; many have been the attempts to unsphere the spirit of a joke and make it tell its secret; but we agree with our excellent and judicious friend Quinctilian, that its ratio is at best anceps. There is a certain robust felicity about old Hobbes's saying, that it is a sudden glory, or sense of eminency above others or our former selves.' There is no doubt at least about the suddenness and the glory; all true laughter must be involuntary, must come and go as it lists, must take us and shake us heartily and by surprise. No man can laugh any more than he can sneeze at will, and he has nearly as little to do with its ending-it dies out, disdaining to be killed. He may grin and guffaw, because these are worked by muscles under the dominion of volition, but your diaphragm, the midriff, into which your joker pokes his elbow, he is the great organ of genuine laughter and the sudden glory, and he, as you all know, when made absurd by hiccup, is masterless as the wind, 'untameable as flies;' there |