[67] Vol. i, p. 23.
CHAPTER XXIII.
"Suavis autem est et vehementer sæpe utilis jocus et facetiæ."—Cic. de Orat.
Abernethy's humour was very peculiar; and though there was of course something in the matter, there was a good deal more, as it appeared to us, in the manner. The secret of humour, we apprehend, lies in the juxtaposition, either expressed or implied, of incongruities, and it is not easy to conceive anything humourous which does not involve these conditions. We have sometimes thought there was just this difference in the humour of Abernethy, as contrasted with that of Sidney Smith. In Smith's, there was something that, told by whom it might be, was always ludicrous. Abernethy's generally lay in the telling.
"The jest's propriety lies in the ear
Of him who hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it,"
although true, was still to be taken in rather a different sense from that in which it is usually received. The former (a far higher species of humour) may be recorded; the dramatic necessities of the other occasion it to die with the author. The expression Abernethy threw into his humour (though of course without that broadness which is excusable in the drama, but which would have been out of place in a philosophical discourse) was a quiet, much-subdued colouring, between the good-nature of Dowton, and (a little closer perhaps to the latter) the more quiet and gentlemanly portions of Munden.