Raillery is more insupportable than wrong; because we have a right to resent injuries, but are ridiculous in being angry at a jest.
There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious.
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.
A great mind is above insults, injustice, grief, and raillery, and would be invulnerable were it not open to compassion.