Children are, more or less, alive to wit, as well as to humour and mere drollery; and when genuine wit is compacted in epigrammatic couplets, and is of a sort which they can apprehend, it has a great use in quickening the faculties. Humour and drollery are contrast:wit is analogy, to perceive which is one of the best preparatory exercises of the faculty of abstraction. Intelligent children will often catch a stroke of wit, before they exhibit any relish for humour. They may, indeed, be amused by a sprightly narrative, while the humour that is strung upon the thread of the story entirely escapes their notice. It is thus that John Gilpin is laughed at by children, as a droll adventure; but is not relished on account of the innumerable strokes of good humoured satire with which it is fraught.
We sometimes find children making a more rigid demand for reason and truth, in what is offered to them for their amusement, than we are ourselves accustomed to make, or than we make in what we provide for them; and it is an occurrence that should be avoided, if possible, for a child, after inquiry, to be forced to reject, as sheer nonsense or absurdity, any thing which his teacher had put in his way. This sort of revulsion of the mind really, but insensibly, disparages a teacher’s influence.
It need hardly be said, that satire, when in a form which children can understand, should be absolutely kept out of their sight and hearing: it is addressed directly to the ma-lign sentiments, and can in no case be of happy influence, even when, seemingly, the force of it bears wholly upon some form of vice or folly. Satire is useful (if at all) in dealing with those who, having again and again heard reason, and spurned it, may perhaps be reclaimed by shame. But this is never the condition of childrenor, at least, of well-trained children. There are, however, certain celebrated works, mainly satirical, but yet in so occult a manner, as
