"I made a very handsome fortune by being, as I supposed, utterly ruined!"
Somebody has described Laughter as "a faculty bestowed exclusively upon man," and one which there is, therefore, a sort of impiety in not exercising as frequently as we can. One may say, with Titus, that we have "lost a day," if it shall have passed without laughing, "An inch of laugh is worth an ell of moan in any state of the market," says one of the old English "Fathers." Pilgrims at the shrine of Mecca consider laughter so essential a part of their devotion that they call upon their prophet to preserve them from sad faces.
"Ah!" cried Rabelais, with an honest pride, as his friends were weeping around his sick bed; "if I were to die ten times over, I should never make you cry half so much as I have made you laugh!"
After all, if laughter be genuine, and consequently a means of innocent enjoyment, can it be inept?
Taylor, an English author, relates in his "Records," that having restored to sight a boy who had been born blind, the lad was perpetually amusing himself with a hand-glass, calling his own reflection his "little man," and inquiring why he could make it do every thing he did, except to shut its eyes. A French lover, making a present of a mirror to his mistress, sent with it the following lines:
"This mirror my object of love will unfold,
Whensoe'er your regard it allures;
Oh, would, when I'm gazing, that might behold
On its surface the object of yours!"
This is very delicate and pretty; but the following old epigram, on the same subject, is in even a much finer strain:
"When I revolve this evanescent state,
How fleeting is its form, how short its date;
My being and my stay dependent still
Not on my own, but on another's will:
I ask myself, as I my image view,
Which is the real shadow of the two?"