Here is the account of a conscientious student's explorations across a horrible great waste. We are more than grateful. It sets one's conscience finally to rest. Vicarious erudition is in some matters, we always knew, the only divine salvation of one's literary life! That way marked with bones of the dead, chiefly camels and asses, we shall not feel in duty bound to go unto perdition. But what commendable courage, what genius for the prolonged fast of the spirit, in the audacious and ascetic Dr. Tucker! Unless the comic spirit is restrained by a feeling for beauty, or at least, a sense of obligation to beautiful form, its products perish as they should; and elaborately to record and analyze them, is like insisting on a resurrection en masse here and now of the mediocre millions well dead and duly replaced. Only a thing of beauty is a joy forever, and hence it chances that nothing is so likely to make one perish of self-pity or snort with rage as obsolete righteous indignation, and elaborate efforts at satiric laughter preserved in doggerel, or, worse yet, would-be heroic verse! A great reverence for the comic has made us welcome this study by Dr. Tucker for its sane critical perspective and scholarly frankness. The introductory chapter is an essay of no mean value. The table in which Dr. Tucker endeavors to classify the world's comic literature may leave out such things as Hugo's "Chatiments" or Heine's "Atta Troll" and the "North Sea" poems; but it is nevertheless suggestive. Making the law of conception and the method of comic procedure subordinate, for purpose of classification, to the often extraneous distinction of verse and prose (so that things spiritually akin are artificially sundered by a great gulf, and things unakin are forced by the token of doggerel rhyme to feign close affinity), would seem an insurmountable obstacle were the author to attempt a sympathetic judgment of artistic satire.