BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The first edition (here reprinted) was published in 1819 in one 8vo. volume (343 pp.), with the following title-page :-'Lectures on the English Comic Writers. Delivered at the Surry Institution. By William Hazlitt. "It is a very good office one man does another, when he tells him the manner of his being pleased." Steele. London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 93. Fleet Street. 1819.' The volume was printed by J. Miller, Noble Street, Cheapside. The third edition' (the second having been presumably a mere re-print of the first), edited by the author's son and published by Templeman, appeared in 1841, and included some additions collected from various sources. These additions are referred to in the notes to the present volume. The first edition was republished by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in Bohn's Library in 1869, and the third edition has quite recently been included in the Temple Classics series 'under the immediate editorial care of Mr. Austin Dobson' (1900). MAN 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. We shed tears from sympathy with real and necessary distress; as we burst into laughter from want of sympathy with that which is unreasonable and unnecessary, the absurdity of which provokes our spleen or mirth, rather than any serious reflections on it. To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of these two! It is a tragedy or a comedy-sad or merry, as it happens. The crimes and misfortunes that are inseparable from it, shock and wound the mind when they once seize upon it, and when the pressure can no longer be borne, seek relief in tears: the follies and absurdities that men commit, or the odd accidents that befal them, afford us amusement from the very rejection of these false claims upon our sympathy, and end in laughter. If every thing that went wrong, if every vanity or weakness in another gave us a sensible pang, it would be hard indeed: but as long as the disagreeableness of the consequences of a sudden disaster is kept out of sight by the immediate oddity of the circumstances, and the absurdity or unaccountableness of a foolish action is the most striking thing in it, the ludicrous prevails over the pathetic, and we receive pleasure instead of pain from the farce of life which is played before us, and which discomposes our gravity as often as it fails to move our anger or our pity! |