‘Accept a miracle, instead of wit:
See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.’
But then the mode of paying it is playful and ironical, and contradicts itself in the very act of making its own performance an humble foil to another’s. Wit hovers round the borders of the light and trifling, whether in matters of pleasure or pain; for as soon as it describes the serious seriously, it ceases to be wit, and passes into a different form. Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference, or an ingenious and striking exposition of those evanescent and glancing impressions of objects which affect us more from surprise or contrast to the train of our ordinary and literal preconceptions, than from anything in the objects themselves exciting our necessary sympathy or lasting hatred. The favourite employment of wit is to add littleness to littleness, and heap contempt on insignificance by all the arts of petty and incessant warfare; or if it ever affects to aggrandise, and use the language of hyperbole, it is only to betray into derision by a fatal comparison, as in the mock-heroic; or if it treats of serious passion, it must do it so as to lower the tone of intense and high-wrought sentiment, by the introduction of burlesque and familiar circumstances. To give an instance or two. Butler, in his Hudibras, compares the change of night into day, to the change of colour in a boiled lobster.
‘The sun had long since, in the lap
Of Thetis, taken out his nap;
And, like a lobster boil’d, the morn
From black to red, began to turn:
When Hudibras, whom thoughts and aching
’Twixt sleeping kept all night, and waking,
Began to rub his drowsy eyes,