Various

“ When we pass from Goldsmith to Hazlitt—one of the greatest names in English criticism—we find that “humour” has grown in meaning, without quite reaching its full development. In the introduction to his Lectures on the English Comic Writers he attempts a classification of the comic spirit into wit and humour. “Humour,” he says, “is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. ”

“ The next fourteen years form one of the most interesting and pregnant periods of Hungarian history. It marks the dawn of a public spirit as represented by the gentry, who, alarmed at the national peril and justly suspicious of the ruling magnates, unhesitatingly placed their destinies in the hands of Hunyadi, the one honest man who by sheer merit had risen within the last ten years from the humble position of a country squire to a leading position in the state. ”

“ Its deep underlying causes can only be understood in the light of the whole of Hungarian history. It is easy to denounce the dominant Magyar classes as a selfish oligarchy, and to criticize the methods by which they have sought to maintain their power. But a nation that for a thousand years had maintained its individuality in the midst of hostile and rival races could not be expected to allow itself without a struggle to be sacrificed to the force of mere numbers, and the less so if it were justified in its claim that it stood for a higher ideal of culture and civilization. ”

“ So great was the contrast between a past which recalled to Protestants nothing but persecution, and a present in which they enjoyed liberty of conscience, that they accepted with a profound gratitude a régime of which the ecclesiastical standpoint was so alien to their traditions. With enthusiasm they repeated the words with which Napoleon had received the pastors at the Tuileries on the 16th of Frimaire, year XII.: “The empire of the law ends where the undefined empire of conscience begins; law and prince are powerless against this liberty.” ”

“ Humour, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view. ”

“ Absurdity is the poet’s game, and good breeding is the nice concealment of absurdity. The truth is, the critic generally mistakes ‘humour’ for ‘wit,’ which is a very different excellence; wit raises human nature above its level; humour acts a contrary part, and equally depresses it. To expect exalted humour is a contradiction in terms.... The poet, therefore, must place the object he would have the subject of humour in a state of inferiority; in other words, the subject of humour must be low.”
That no doubt may remain in his reader’s mind, Goldsmith gives an example of true humour. ”

“ But the liberation of Hungary from the Turks brought no relief to the Hungarians. The ruthless suppression of the Magyar malcontents, in which there was little discrimination between the innocent and the guilty, had so crushed the spirit of the country that Leopold considered the time ripe for realizing a long-cherished ideal of the Habsburgs and changing Hungary from an elective into an hereditary monarchy. For this purpose a diet was assembled at Pressburg in the autumn of 1687. ”

“ The ideas of space and time, as will presently be pointed out, are copies of impressions conceived in a particular manner. The idea of necessary connexion is merely the reproduction of an impression which the mind feels itself compelled to conceive in a particular manner. Such a fashion of disguising difficulties points, not only to an inconsistency in Hume’s theory as stated by himself, but to the initial error upon which it proceeds; for these perplexities are but the consequences of the doctrine that cognition is to be explained on the basis of particular perceptions. ”

“ The mysteries of scent are certainly no better comprehended now than they were more than a hundred years ago when Peter Beckford wrote his Thoughts on Hunting. The subject of scent is full of mysteries. The great authority already quoted, the 8th duke of Beaufort, noted as a very extraordinary but well-known fact, for example, “that in nine cases out of ten if a fox is coursed by a dog during a run all scent ceases afterwards, even when you get your hounds to the line of the fox beyond where the dog has been.” ”

“ Yet despite the interminable wars and rebellions which darken the history of Hungary in the reign of Sigismund, the country, on the whole, was progressing. Its ready response to the king’s heavy demands for the purpose of the national defence points to the existence of a healthy and self-sacrificing public spirit, and the eagerness with which the youth of all classes now began to flock to the foreign universities is another satisfactory feature of the age. ”

“ Kronstadt, now the sole flourishing trade centre in the kingdom, defended itself with hired mercenaries against the robber barons. Everywhere the civic communities were declining; even Buda and Pressburg were half in ruins. In their misery the cities frequently appealed for protection to the emperor and other foreign potentates, as no redress was attainable at home. Compared even with the contemporary Polish diet the Hungarian national assembly was a tumultuous mob. ”

“ But this is explicitly the idea of the said thing as having had or as about to have existence,—in other words, belief in the existence of some matter of fact. What, for a conscious experience so constituted as Hume will admit, is the precise significance of such belief in real existence?
Clearly the real existence of a fact is not demonstrable. For whatever is may be conceived not to be. “No negation of a fact can involve a contradiction.” Existence of any fact, not present as a perception, can only be proved by arguments from cause or effect. ”

“ It was in 1772 that Hunter, in order effectually to gauge the extent of his own knowledge, and also correctly to express his views, which had been repeatedly misstated or ascribed to others, began his lectures on the theory and practice of surgery, at first delivered free to his pupils and a few friends, but subsequent to 1774 on the usual terms, four guineas. Though Pott, indeed, had perceived that the only true system of surgery is that which most closely accords with the curative efforts of nature, a rational pathology can hardly be said to have had at this time any existence ”

“ To sum up, it may be said that Hume enunciated the principle that “everything in the world is purchased by labour, and our passions are the only causes of labour”; and further, that, in analysing the complex phenomena of commerce, he is superior sometimes to Adam Smith in that he never forgets that the ultimate causes of economic change are the “customs and manners” of the people, and that the solution of problems is to be sought in the elementary factors of industry. ”

“ Although he broke off the Magyar tribal system, encouraged the private ownership of land, and even made grants of land on condition of military service—in order to secure an armed force independent of the national levy—he based his new principle of government, not on feudalism, but on the organization of the Frankish empire, which he adapted to suit the peculiar exigencies of his realm. Of the institutions thus borrowed and adapted the most notable was the famous county system which still plays so conspicuous a part in Hungarian national life. ”

“ A kennel huntsman proper may be described as the man who does duty when the master hunts his own hounds, undertaking all the responsibilities of the huntsman except actually hunting the pack. It may be said that the first duty of a huntsman is to obtain the confidence of his hounds, to understand them and to make himself understood; and the intelligence of hounds is remarkable. If, for example, it is the habit of the huntsman to give a single note on his horn when hounds are drawing a covert, and a double note when a fox is found, the pack speedily understand the significance. ”

“ Every obstacle was opposed to the collection of the taxes which had been voted to put the kingdom in a state of defence. “If this realm could be saved at the expense of three florins,” exclaimed the papal envoy, Antonio Burgio, “there is not a man here willing to make the sacrifice.” Only on the southern frontier did Archbishop Tomori painfully assemble a fresh army and fleet, and succeed, by incredible efforts, in constructing at Péterwardein, on the right bank of the Danube, a new fortress which served him as a refuge and sally post in his interminable guerilla war with the Turks. ”

“ Opening with a vision of Eve in Paradise which eclipses Milton’s in beauty no less than in sublimity—a dream of the mother of mankind at the hour when she knew the first sense of dawning motherhood, it closes with a vision of the trumpet to be sounded on the day of judgment which transcends the imagination of Dante by right of a realized idea which was utterly impossible of conception to a believer in Dante’s creed: the idea of real and final equity ”

“ The unfinished poems, Dieu and La Fin de Satan, are full to overflowing of such magnificent work, such wise simplicity of noble thought, such heroic and pathetic imagination, such reverent and daring faith, as no other poet has ever cast into deathless words and set to deathless music. ”