Would serve as well.
There were other Spaniards, doubtless, who possessed humor or wit, but the only available translations of their plays or stories are too long for quotation.
RUSSIAN HUMOR
A glance at Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows the great popularity of the Fable as a means of expressing the wit and wisdom of the philosophers.
The two greatest Fabulists were Ivan Chemnitzer or Khemnitzer and Ivan Kryloff.
Alexander Griboyedoff was a writer of comedies.
Ivan Chemnitzer
THE PHILOSOPHER
A certain rich man, who had heard it was an advantage to have been at school abroad, sent his son to study in foreign parts. The son, who was an utter fool, came back more stupid than ever, having been taught all sorts of elaborate explanations of the simplest things by a lot of academical windbags. He expressed himself only in scientific terms, so that no one understood him, and everyone became very tired of him.
One day, while walking along a road, and gazing at the sky in speculating upon some problem of the universe to which the answer had never been found (because there was none), the young man stepped over the edge of a deep ditch. His father, who chanced to be near by, ran to get a rope. The son, however, sitting at the bottom of the ditch, began to meditate on the cause of his fall. He concluded that an earthquake had superinduced a momentary displacement of his corporeal axis, thus destroying his equilibrium, and, in obedience to the law of gravity as established by Newton, precipitating him downward until he encountered an immovable obstacle—namely, the bottom of the ditch.
When his father arrived with the rope, the following dialogue took place between them: