Excerpt from The World's Wit and Humor, Vol. 10: French; Ruteboeuf to Balzac It is because we can abstract from the Sincere fiction of foreign peoples this intimate essence of national meaning that the novel and the play have for us their larger sig nificance. But from the humor of a people we can express this intimate essence even more certainly than we can from their fiction. Show me what a man laughs at, and I will tell you what he is. The merry jest which sets in a roar the miscellaneous audience of a variety-show is a document of real value in estimating the character of a population; and the casual quip of a paragrapher which goes the round of the papers may help us to a sound conclusion as swiftly as the more laborious investigations of the political philosopher. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.