Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys a monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous.

So pleasant is pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale.

But it is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her errors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent revenge.

But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate, which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with fact.

To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent irony is unmeaning.