Yet perhaps a deeper knowledge of time and character is needed to sound the depths of Sir Robert Walpole's cynical observation, "Gratitude is a lively sense of future favors;" although this is indeed a type of witticism which possesses inherent vitality, not depending upon any play of words or double meanings, but striking deep root into the fundamental failings of the human heart.
It is in its simplest forms, however, that humor enjoys a world-wide actuality, and is the connecting link of all times and places and people. "Let us start from laughter," says M. Edmond Scherer, "since laughter is a thing familiar to every one. It is excited by a sense of the ridiculous, and the ridiculous arises from the contradiction between the use of a thing and its intention." Even that commonest of all themes, a fellow-creature slipping or falling, M. Scherer holds to be provocative of mirth; and in selecting this elementary example he bravely drives the matter back to its earliest and rudest principles. For it is a weapon in the hands of the serious that such casualties, which should excite instant sympathy and alarm, awaken laughter only in
