The boast will not be thought
an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked
themselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparkling
laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a
step in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step in
cultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they
will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the
larger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power of
laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to
despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of
Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast. Nothing in
the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus
and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike
OEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by his
imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under the
obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow--the
god's iou--iou being the lustier--means only the stopping of a sneeze, or
horseman sighted, or the prelude to an invocation to some deity: and the
slave contrives that the god shall get the bigger lot of blows.
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