have the slightest suspicion of their being born
out of the country.

There is such a thing, we take it, as a nation
being too greedy; wanting more jokes—not
satisfied even with twenty–one millions, and
saying:, "Take our twenty–one million jokes, if
you please. "We are a little sick of them; and
give us a new joke or two." It would not
regard any honours as too high for the author
of a new joke, and people will do well to
consider the proper steps to be taken if the man
should appear, as, one fine day, he may. We
anticipate that he will be received with
acclamations as one of the great minds of the
particular generation it may please him to honour.
The year in which he manifests himself will
enjoy a celebrity far beyond that of any comet.
How warily he would have to reconnoitre his
ground! What cruelly hard work he would
have of it, eye–deep in jokes for years, to ascertain
beyond the possibility of a doubt that
there was no little mistake to the extent of a
mare's–nest! Probably his claim would be
referred to an international congress of aged wits,
representing every joke–producing country under
the sun.

It would be of service to a gentleman desirous
of becoming the hero of this proud and
interesting situation to know exactly what a joke
is. Joke, Latinè jocus, is a piece of pleasantry,
a sally, a jest: which, to be perfect in all its
parts, shall have a point, Latinè punctus, as a
mouse has a tail, or a bee a sting. It happens
that some mice have no tails, some bees no
stings, and it happens that some jokes have no
points. If the statistics of the twenty–one
million extant jokes could be accurately
tabulated, it has been roughly estimated that a
small percentage would have to be discounted
for jokes in this predicament. About one
emerald in five hundred bears the test of the
microscope; about one joke in fifty thousand
stands the crucial test.

There are subtle likenesses in things apparently
unlike. As an expert in precious stones
says to a man, handing him back in perfectly
cold blood his beautiful diamond, "That is the
best paste I ever saw," so an assayer of modern
facetiæ returns your joke, with "Clever, but in
Lucian;" or, "Hierocles was before you!" or,
"Very well put; but how capitally Erasmus
brings that in, in such and such a place." He
will get you into a corner somewhere. He has
the whole matter at his fingers' ends. He knows
every joke that was ever made, who made it,
why he made it, and how many have made it
since.

The fathers of typography were probably the
worst enemies that the disciples of the joking
craft ever had to encounter. The invention of
printing was positively a very gross inconvenience.
Anybody who did not happen to have
been born, forsooth, in the fifth century, and
who made a joke, was henceforward to be
branded as a borrower, because Lucian had got
it in his Hetairæ, or Athenæus in his Deipnosophistæ
As if it were likely that every one could
be born at once, and start even! MSS. have a
fortunate tendency to turn to mould, but with
printed books it is different; they keep on
multiplying out of all reason, and thrust
themselves before people's eyes in a way that leaves
no chance for men coming (by no fault of their
own) after Erasmus, and the rest of them.
Printing was precisely the kind of thing which,
when it had once started, there was no keeping
within decent limits. We can bring to mind
but one consolation. Some day this very press
may take in hand those venerable Irish
manuscripts (if they are happily preserved), the origin
of which is lost in antiquity, and of which it is
alleged by (Irish) scholars that Hierocles had the
use. The history of the matter seems to be, that
those unprinted treasures, compiled in what was
at that time the only spoken language, have been
sealed up for centuries somewhere; but their
publication will establish the fact, doubtless,
that they are the long–lost originals, from which
the Chinese and other more modern nations have
been borrowing without the least acknowledgment.
The circumstantial testimony in favour of
this supposition is regarded by competent (Irish)
judges as remarkably strong. They say, that
out of the twenty–one million jokes in circulation
at present, no fewer than nineteen million
five hundred thousand are clearly of Irish
parentage. These inedited archives, they say,
only await an editor. When such a person is
found, there is no question that he will feel
himself under deep obligations to us for a few
remarks which we think we can place at his
service, in support of his general argument.

What can be more evidently Irish than this?
The book from which it comes was printed as
lately as 1530. The printer carelessly dropped a
word, which we have supplied between brackets:
"A certayne [Irish] curate, preachynge on a
tyme to his parysshens, sayde that our Lorde
with fyue loves fedde v hundred persones. The
clerke, herynge hym fayle, sayde softely in his
eare: Sir, ye erre; the gospell is v thousande.
Holde thy peace, foole, said the curate; they wyll
scantly beleue that they were fyue hundred."

There can be little question that the next
article comes from the same source. It occurs
in the same modern work: "There was a
man that had a dulle lumpisshe felow to his
seruant, wherfore he vsed commonly to call
him the kinge of fooles. The felow [who was
an Yrysheman by birthe] at laste waxed angry
in his minde to be alway so called, and sayde to
his mayster: I wolde that I were the kinge of
foles; for then no man coulde compare with me
in largenes of kingdome, and also you shulde
be my subiect. By this we may perceive that
to moch of one thing is not good: many one
calleth an other fole, that is more fole him
selfe." A volume might be filled with these
examples.

We find, not very far back (comparatively
speaking), in fact, in Henry the Eighth's time,
a physician of the name of Borde putting forth
what, with excessive effrontery, he calls
Gothamite Tales. But their true extraction