cation of the sacrifice of Christ. But no one who has read either volume can be in any danger of ever losing sight of or of failing to appreciate, the fact that the object of that sacrifice was to restore mankind to the hope of sonship, which is eternal life. There still remains the question, whether, in the teaching of either writer, that kind of importance is given to the death of Christ which it has in Holy Scripture. Both, indeed, teach that forgiveness of sins is assured to us in the new covenant, though Dr. Bushnell, as we have said, treats it somewhat too lightly, as if, indeed, there were no such difficulty in the matter as is generally supposed. Greatly as we admire his treatise, we cannot but believe that he entirely fails to account for the close connexion between our Saviour's death and remission of sin which the language of the apostle and of Christ himself conveys. And let us be allowed again to say, that the assurance of this remission, as in some way connected with Christ's death, must be sufficient for right belief, even though it is left quite unexplained how the death was effectual for our forgiveness. No one should find fault with individual Christians for believing that the remission of sins here spoken of is not the direct, but the indirect consequence of the Saviour's death, which works immediately by bringing men to repentance and the mind of sonship, and thus into that true relation with God in which remission of sins is an essential privilege. Yet we cannot think that this indirect relation satisfies the words of Christ and His apostles in their simplest and most natural sense. Mr. Campbell's teaching does seem to us to satisfy them, if we may give somewhat greater prominence to ideas which form part of it. For he speaks frequently of the confession of sin as made by Him in humanity for it, of His presenting to the Father in it and for it, a righteousness which humanity could not itself present, of the death of Christ as perfecting His expiatory confession of our sin, and being thus a propitiation, as accepted as a Divine judgment upon the sins of men, whose brother He was. In such thoughts we seem to find a full appreciation of the passages of Scripture which we refer to, although the author so strongly disapproves of the doctrine of penal suffering transferred to Christ. On this negative side of his subject, also, we are disposed to think his arguments convincing. And if any of our readers should fear lest the omission of this element in their view of the Atonement should diminish its moral power as a motive, or its comfort as an assurance, we venture to believe that, in the reflections upon the whole subject adduced by Mr. Campbell, they will find sufficient guarantee for both, as well as a rich store of thoughts, most fruitful in practical effects. ART. IV. 1. Constable's Miscellany. Vol. X. Table-Talk. Edin. 1827. 2. The Jest-Book. Selected and arranged by MARK LEMON. London, 1864. THE connexion between Reason and Ridicule seems to be very close; though its nature certainly is not very clear. The only animal that reasons is also the only animal that laughs, and apparently, too, the only one that is laughed at, or that deserves to be so. Beasts, acting by instinct, are never absurd, humanity having reserved that privilege exclusively to itself. Listen to Swift :: 'Brutes find out where their talents lie: And where his genius least inclines, In connexion, perhaps, with the gift of reason and the privilege of absurdity thus bestowed, the faculty of laughter was superadded in our constitution to keep absurdity within bounds, to make reason humble, and to lead us to look at the unavoidable follies of each other with good-humoured sympathy rather than with scornful disgust. Hazlitt, in his Comic Writers, very justly connects laughter with its opposite, on principles not essentially at variance with those we have been suggesting: 'Man,' he says, 'is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles.' The aspects in which we have now considered Ridicule seem to harmonize well with Aristotle's view of it. He describes in his Poetics the laughable' or comic (rò yeλoîov) as being ἁμάρτημά τι καὶ αἶσχος ἀνώδυνον καὶ οὐ φθαρτικόν. This is frequently translated as if áμáprnua meant any fault or deformity generally. But we cannot help thinking that by åμáprηua here, Aristotle means that species of fault or deviation which consists in a failure of aim or missing of the mark; and in this sense the distorted face,' which he gives as an instance of the comic, may well enough be called an åμáprηua, as being something that attempts to be a face, but does not succeed. We do not affirm that all ridiculous things consist in this failure of aim; but we venture to say that that category embraces a large proportion of them. There are two elements, however, in Aristotle's definition of the ludicrous, which are quite essential, but which are apt to be forgotten 1st, the fault or failure, in order to be laughable, must be, if not ignominious, at least inglorious; and 2d, it must be unattended with pain or injury. The failure must be a discomfiture, involving a gross want of calculation or self-knowledge, and unredeemed by any circumstances that ennoble it. In great attempts 'tis glorious even to fail ;' and the defeat at Thermopyla was more illustrious than many a victory elsewhere. Again, an occurrence which involves pain or injury cannot be truly laughable, and it ought not to be necessary to add, that the pain or injury here contemplated is not what we ourselves feel, but what may affect the object of our supposed ridicule. Unfortunately, however, the case of the Boys and the Frogs in the fable finds a frequent parallel in everyday life, and it is well that would-be wits and heedless jesters should be reminded, on the highest authority, that there can be no legitimate subject of laughter where the feelings or rightful interests of any one are wounded or assailed. Examples of these laughable failures to which we refer are to be readily found. Even literal failures of aim are laughable, such as a very bad cast at bowls, or a very wide shot in archery. Mr. Pickwick's attempt to drive a gig, and Mr. Winkle's exploits as a sportsman, are first-rate pictures in their way. The Feast of the Ancients in Peregrine Pickle is about the most laughable thing that was ever written, and depends entirely for its effect on the elements we have been explaining. But the principle goes further and deeper. Every instance of unsuccessful affectation, every assumption of a false character that is at once detected, every preposterous attempt to shine where excellence is hopeless, all these are fertile sources of entertainment, and legitimate objects of ridicule. The faded beauty and the battered beau, the learned lady who misuses her words, the ambitious singer who has neither ear nor voice, are standing butts at which laughter has been directed from the beginning of time; and similar exhibitions of character will continue to amuse future generations as they have done the past. Don Quixote, the great comic Epic of all literature, delights us by a series of failures, recommended by the kindly and benevolent spirit in which the adventures are undertaken, but rendered ludicrous by the meanness of the preparations made and the impracticability of the objects pursued; and of all the hero's failures, none is more conspicuously ludicrous than the attempt to convert his worldly and sensual attendant into a fitting squire for a chivalrous master. The Vert-vert of Gresset, one of the best of comic poems, and so well translated by Father Prout, amuses us by the elaborate attempts and confident hopes of the good nuns to make a saint of their parrot, and in the sad revolution in his character and vocabulary produced by an inland voyage through France to visit a distant nunnery, whose inmates he astonishes with the latest epithets and phrases in use among the bargemen, his associates in his transit. In John Gilpin, which is a matchless miniature epic, the jest consists in like manner in the worthy citizen's abortive attempt to dine with his wife and family in a suburban inn, and in the incidents by which he twice overshoots the mark, and ends dinnerless at night where he began in the morning. We may observe at the same time, as there exemplified, how universally people are amused with bad horsemanship. The Tailor's journey to Brentford, as exhibited in the ring, made us laugh as children; the cavalcade of Commodore Trunnion and his comrades on his marriage day convulsed us as we grew up; and we find in Italian jest-books the same source of mirth in their frequent stories as to the disasters encountered by Venetians on horseback. Edward II. was particularly fond of a jester, whose recommendation was his apparent inability to keep the saddle, and who on journeys. rode before the king, and kept continually tumbling off, to his Majesty's infinite amusement. If we laugh at such discomfitures when arising from inadequacy of means or want of skill in those who are engaged in them, the height of the ludicrous, and certainly the height of absurdity, seems to be exhibited when the means taken for success are directly productive of the unsuccessful result. This frequent source of the ludicrous is exemplified in various shapes. The Irish bull, though Ireland has no monopoly of the article, is an instance of what we mean, particularly when it assumes a practical form. The mob that collected and made a bonfire of an unpopular banker's notes in order to ruin him; the man who loudly gave the lie to the charge against him in a letter, that he was looking at it over the writer's shoulder; the little boy that, for a trick in school, answered 'Absum' when his name was called,-all contrived to raise the laugh against themselves by the suicidal nature of their proceedings. We have indicated that Ireland, though it may be a favourable soil for such a growth, is not the only country where bulls are pro duced. The story of the Irishman reading over the letterwriter's shoulder is of Oriental origin, as Miss Edgeworth, or her father, has shown in the Essay that bears her name. It is taken from Les Paroles Remarquables des Orientaux, by Galland, who thus tells it, with somewhat needless particularity :- 'Un savant écrivait à un ami, et un importun était à côté de lui, qui regardait par dessus l'épaule dessus l'épaule ce qu'il écrivait. Le savant, qui s'en aperçut, écrivit ceci à la place: Si un impertinent qui est à mon côté ne regardait pas ce que j'écris, je vous écrirais encore plusieurs choses qui ne doivent être sues que de vous et de moi. L'importun, qui lisait toujours, prit la parole et dit: "Je vous jure que je n'ai regardé ni lû ce que vous écrivez." Le savant repartit: "Ignorant, que vous êtes, pourquoi me dites-vous donc ce que vous dites ?'"'' A story very like it is to be found in the so-called Hierocles, being the twenty-eighth of the collection. A Scholasticus, who had neglected a commission for books conveyed to him in a letter, exculpated himself, when he met his friend, by crying out, 'I never received the letter you sent me about those books.' Another example of a bull is to be found in No. 10 of that collection, where a Scholasticus sits down before a looking-glass with his eyes shut, to see if he looked well in his sleep. The Greek book that we have just noticed, and which bears the title of 'Aoreîa (Facetiæ, Urbanitates), is rightly considered as not the work of the philosopher Hierocles, and is not a very mighty production. It contains twenty-nine stories, in all of which a Scholasticus, or school pedant, is the hero; and its object is to ridicule the ignorance and stupidity of mere students. It is well known as the source of a good many of our current Joe Millers. In No. 1, the Scholasticus, having been nearly drowned, resolves not to go into the water again till he has learned to swim. In Nos. 6 and 14 he is ashamed to meet his doctor, as it is so long a time since he was ill. In No. 8 he anticipates the attempt of the Highlander to accustom his horse to go without food, and laments that the animal had died just as he had taught him his lesson. In No. 9, when wanting to sell his house, he carries about with him one of the stones or bricks as a specimen. In No. 16 he finds that some of the liquor is wanting in a sealed hogshead, and on a suggestion that it had been drawn out from below, he rejects the idea, as the deficiency was not at the bottom but at the top of the cask. In No. 19, two of the tribe meeting on the street, one of them says he had heard the other was dead, on which his friend observes that it was not so, as he was here alive. 'Ah!' was the reply, 'but my informant is a more trustworthy person than you;' a story which foreshadows what is told of a certain Scotch family, who, on hearing from their son that he had not gone down in |