This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our older
English writers. And as the distinction between imagination and fancy,
made popular by Wordsworth, found its best justification in certain
essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings, so this
other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a sort of
visible interpretation and instance in the character and writings of
Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most writers among
subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still full of curious
interest for the student of literature as a fine art.
The author of the _English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,_
coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true
pre-eminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened
by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,
which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and
therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more
boisterous.
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