He was a very subtle schoolman, who first said that we owe the origin of the word “buffoon” to a little Athenian sacrificer called Bupho, who, being tired of his employment, absconded, and never returned. The Areopagus, as they could not punish the priest, proceeded against his hatchet. This farce, which was played every year in the temple of Jupiter, is said to have been called “buffoonery.” This story is not entitled to much credit. Buffoon was not a proper name; bouphonos signifies an immolator of oxen. The Greeks never called any jest bouphonia. This ceremony, frivolous as it appears, might have an origin wise and humane, worthy of true Athenians.

Once a year, the subaltern sacrificer, or more properly the holy butcher, when on the point of immolating an ox, fled as if struck with horror, to put men in mind that in wiser and happier times only flowers and fruits were offered to the gods, and that the barbarity of immolating innocent and useful animals was not introduced until there were priests desirous of fattening on their blood and living at the expense of the people. In this idea there is no buffoonery.

This word “buffoon” has long been received among the Italians and the Spaniards, signifying mimus, scurra, joculator — a mimic, a jester, a player of tricks. Ménage, after Salmasius, derives it from bocca infiata — a bloated face; and it is true that a round face and swollen cheeks are requisite in a buffoon. The Italians say bufo magro — a meagre buffoon, to express a poor jester who cannot make you laugh.

Buffoon and buffoonery appertain to low comedy, to mountebanking, to all that can amuse the populace. In this it was — to the shame of the human mind be it spoken — that tragedy had its beginning: Thespis was a buffoon before Sophocles was a great man.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish and English tragedies were all degraded by disgusting buffooneries. The courts were still more disgraced by buffoons than the stage. So strong was the rust of barbarism, that men had no taste for more refined pleasures. Boileau says of Molière:

C’est par-là que Molière, illustrant ses écrits,

Peut-être de son art e?t emporté le prix,

Si, moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures,

Il n’e?t fait quelquefois, grimacer ses figures,

Quitté pour le bouffon l’agréable et fin,

Et sans honte à Terence allié Tabarin.

Dans ce sac ridicule où Scapin s’enveloppe,

Je ne reconnais plus l’auteur du Misanthrope.

Molière in comic genius had excelled,

And might, perhaps, have stood unparalleled,

Had he his faithful portraits ne’er allowed

To gape and grin to gratify the crowd;

Deserting wit for low grimace and jest,

And showing Terence in a motley vest.

Who in the sack, where Scapin plays the fool,

Will find the genius of the comic school?

But it must be considered that Raphael condescended to paint grotesque figures. Molière would not have descended so low, if all his spectators had been such men as Louis XIV., Condé, Turenne, La Rochefoucauld, Montausier, Beauvilliers, and such women as Montespan and Thianges; but he had also to please the whole people of Paris, who were yet quite unpolished. The citizen liked broad farce, and he paid for it. Scarron’s “Jodelets” were all the rage. We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age, before we can rise above it; and, after all, we like to laugh now and then. What is Homer’s “Battle of the Frogs and Mice,” but a piece of buffoonery — a burlesque poem?

Works of this kind give no reputation, but they may take from that which we already enjoy.

Buffoonery is not always in the burlesque style. “The Physician in Spite of Himself,” and the “Rogueries of Scapin,” are not in the style of Scarron’s “Jodelets.” Molière does not, like Scarron, go in search of slang terms; his lowest characters do not play the mountebank. Buffoonery is in the thing, not in the expression.

Boileau’s “Lutrin” was at first called a burlesque poem, but it was the subject that was burlesque; the style was pleasing and refined, and sometimes ev............