Studies in Jocular Literature. By W. Carew Hazlitt. (Elliot Stock.)
—This book does not profess to be a collection of " ana," or to be in any respect fragmentary in character ; on the contrary, the alternative title is "A Popular Subject more closely Considered." If Mr. Hazlitt fails at all in his interesting little book, it is in being elaborate in his theories of jocosity to the verge of meta- physical pedantry. We might well have been spared a good deal of theorising of so very obvious a kind as :—" The origin of all. jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development, when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable; and it does not require the long establishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludicrous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment." Apart from rather ornate, not to say oracular, declarations of this kind, Mr. Hazlitt's book is very well arranged, and is in every respect to the point. Such titles of some of his chapters as "Literature and the Drama as Contributories to Jocular Literature," "The Noctes Attices," "The Marred Anecdote," "Facetious Biographies," and "The Ballad and the Nursery Rhyme," themselves give an idea of the manner in which his work has been arranged. It contains a fair number, not ossly of jokes and of mots, but of anecdotes ; and these are, perhaps preferable both to the jokes and to the mots, for there is hardly anything belonging to either category that does not seem to be credited to half-a-dozen wits writing at different times. It is rather pleasant to find it stated—and proved—in regard to the now rather neglected "Joe Miller," that its appearance marked the transition between the old style of jests and the new. Altogether, Studies in Jocular Literature is a book of the sort te which not an hour only, but an evening, may be pleasantly and profitably devoted.
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