Addison
Arnold, M.
Benson
De Quincey
Hamerton
Harrison
Hazlitt
Howells
Lamb
Lang
La Ramée
Lowell
Macaulay
Mill
Mitchell
Montaigne
Morley
Pater
Ruskin
Sainte-Beuve
Sidney
Steele
Stephen
Stevenson
Thackeray
Thoreau
Walton
Warner
White, G.
HUMOR
Humor is the most subtle of intellectual modes of expression. To define it and lay down its laws and principles is all but beyond human power. For it ranges from the inspired nonsense of Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" or the rough and ready gusto of Browne's "Showman's Courtship" to the airily intangible delicacy of Lamb's "Essays of Elia" and the venomous sarcasm of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Mere wit turns on an absurd similarity in words or ideas, as in Hood's lines:
"They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton tolled the bell."
Yet the deepest humor is all but pathos; Don Quixote's demented visions of giants that prove to be windmills and of castles that turn out to be taverns provoke our laughter while they stir our pity.