And herein lies one of the chief impediments to making a real success of a comic periodical. A thorough Bohemian, for the most part, is the very brilliant contributor, - a bird difficult to catch and not always available when caught, seeing that, in nine cases out of ten, his habits are no more under his control than his moods. The electric sparks thrown out by some of them, when in full glow, seemed to fall back upon them in ashes, and smother their too sudden fires. Of all the writers with whom I have travelled, from time to time, along the highways and by-ways of comic literature, I have known but two or three really sparkling ones whose aid could be relied upon, to a certainty, for any given day or week. Contributors to comic papers may be divided into two classes, - the brilliant ones, and the reliable ones and it is very rare to find in one person a combination of the characteristics belonging to these respectively. The strain of always trying to be witty and epigrammatic on the surface, without losing grasp for a moment of the weightier considerations involved, is one against which few minds could contend successfully for long continuous periods and hence the desultory mode of working so generally characteristic of writers who make a specialty of this kind of literature. Great assiduity is a thing almost incompatible with humorous writing. I take it to be a matter generally admitted by all who have tried on the mask of comic journalism, that it is no velvet one, but rather suggestive than otherwise of that iron visor behind which a certain mysterious character in history was compelled, for so many years, to put the best face he could upon circumstances.
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