beyond their threshold are strange to them, they are continually being amused when they travel. Adults, so shrewd that we can hardly suspect them of a hearty laugh, travesty this mood, as they travesty all that is really touching in life and history, and call themselves "Innocents Abroad." But the real child, who begins by being afraid of a false face, a dwarf, or a giant, a little later grins at them; and Hazlitt tells us that "three chimney-sweepers meeting three Chinese in Lincoln's Inn Fields, they laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down." With the increase of knowledge and sorrow, the latent differences of nature are developed : the severe man becomes grim; the shallow takes delight in the flippancies of burlesque and parody; the cynic jeers alike at humbug and hypocrisy, patriotism and benevolence; the genial man finds matter for smiles in sorrow and for tears in joy, while following and sharing either fortune of his friend. Wit and Humour, the one more the growth of nature, the other of art, are Fancy and Imagination inverted; as when we look through the large end of a telescope and see everything small. They manifest themselves variously in nations as well as individuals. Humour, in the Greek classics, shows itself mainly in the guise of a lambent irony, at the expense of the speaker or his neighbours; in the English, as a subtle appreciation of the curiosities of character. In Sterne and Fielding, as in Ben Jonson, we have "Every man in his humour." In some forms it implies the sense of a contradiction or conflict between the higher and lower phases of human nature: in others a full perception of the whole character, as in the Canterbury Tales: in others the power of isolating, and concentrating the attention on single features a broad mouth, a prominent nose, an absorbing egotism or a rampant pomposity, which is the dominant note of the humour of Dickens. This, the least mellow and refined of its forms, is that which almost alone we find in

AMERICAN HUMOUR.

405

the New World. Our insular doubt as to the existence of American Humour is analogous to the French problem, “Can a German have esprit ?" In both cases the qualities exist; but in rudimentary and often questionable shapes. Transatlantic Humour seldom penetrates to the undercurrents of life: it is the rare efflorescence of a people habitually grave, whose insight is more clear than deep it relies mainly on exaggeration, and a blending of jest and earnest, which has the effect, as in their negro melodies, of singing comic words to a sad tune. Nine-tenths of it relies on the figures of hyperbole, antithesis, and anticlimax. Mr. Lowell, for example, makes us laugh, by instancing the description of a negro

:

so black that charcoal made a chalk mark upon him;" and of a wooden shingle "painted so like marble that it sank in the water." Other wits tell us-that a tree" was so tall that it took two men and a boy to see to the top of it;" that a boat "drew so little water it could sail wherever there had been a heavy dew;" that a. man was "so heavy that his shadow, falling on a boy, killed him." Mr. Browne (Artemus Ward) excited the same kind of merriment by his remark, in pointing to the deliberately daubed canvas, which he called his panorama, "The highest part of this mountain is the top." The amusement in these and like instances is owing to a shock of surprise, produced by a falsehood plausibly pretending to be true, or by a truism pretending to be a novelty. Similarly, when the last-named writer, among his anecdotes of the conscription, informs us that "one young man who was draw'd, claimed to be exemp', because he was the only son of a widowed mother, who supported him," the jest is all in the unexpected turn of the last three words. Whereas the humour of Falstaff, of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, of Colonel Bath and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Major Pendennis and Bishop Blougram, consists in its truth. What these people do or say never

surprises us: it is absurd, as much of human life is absurd; and laughing at them, we feel we are laughing at something in ourselves. Consequently we have an affection for them, and are never tired of them; whereas we never go back to the same circus with the same clown. An essay of Elia is a quiet fire, at which we can always warm ourselves: a Yankee joke is a cracker that, once pulled, has served its turn; we can never smile at it twice in one life; a mushroom of the Comic Weekly, it dies in the railway stall. Its author has his good things-his audience unfit though many-here, and must expect oblivion hereafter.

The records of American light literature, of course, supply numerous exceptions to this rule. Several of the generally satirical jeux d'esprit of the Colonial and Revolution days have still an historical as well as a local interest. In the age immediately succeeding, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, fluent in versification as in oratory, shows considerable wit, if not humour, in his parody of Barlow's Discoveries of Captain Davis, and in his Wants of Man, which the following verses must serve to illustrate :

:

QUINCY ADAMS-O. W. HOLMES.

"I want the seals of power

and place,

The ensigns of command;

Charged by the people's unbought grace
To rule my native land.

I want the voice of honest praise
To follow me behind,

And to be thought in future days
The friend of human kind."

407

In the second quarter of the century-the first prolific age of American literature-we begin to see the divergence of two kinds of Humour; the one of the higher rank allied to dramatic imagination, the other leaning to burlesque. To the former belong much of the work of Washington Irving, Longfellow's Kavanagh, a few of the lighter passages of Hawthorne, as the Seven Vagabonds, and the prose and verse of Dr. HOLMES. In the three pleasant volumes by which this versatile author is probably best known to English readers, The Autocrat, The Professor, and The Poet at the Breakfast Table, there is much that might have been omitted, more that should have been condensed. They are overladen with puns; they bristle with jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and are sometimes tainted with New England affectations. Many of the remarks that might have passed current in conversation seem scarce worthy of being set down in type. But Holmes, even while talking too fast, conciliates us by his constant kindliness: he exhibits to us, with a quaint mannerism not without its charm, personages, and situations, which we regard as odd and yet recognise as real. The Autocrat abounds in wise saws and instances similar to those above selected from Elsie Venner-interspersed with short sentences of pointed satire we find difficult to forget, e.g.—

"Nature, when she invented critics of the chips that were left." the handle which fits them all." will dispense with its necessaries."

and manufactured authors, made "Sin has many tools, but a lie is "Give us the luxuries of life and we "A new lecture is just like any

other tool. We use it for a while with pleasure: then it blisters our hands and we hate to touch it." "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels, if anything is thrust among them suddenly.... Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances: I confess that I think better of them than of those who hold the same notions and remain outside."

In turning these pages we constantly come upon flashing paradoxes, and other coruscations of what has been called a kaleidoscopic wit. This volume also contains the author's best verses-some gay, as The One Hoss Shay; some grave, as Musa, The Two Armies, The Nautilus; others, as The Old Man Dreams, and Spring has Come, belonging to the borderland. Add the agreeable, because not too pronounced, flavour of sentiment, in the love story of the Schoolmistress, and we can understand how this book has enjoyed a wider popularity than its companions. In The Poet at the Breakfast Table there is less variety; but it contains the author's most amusing satire on scientific pedantry—

"How do you think the vote is likely to go to-morrow?' I said. 'It isn't to-morrow,' he answered, 'it's next month.'

'Next month!' said I. Why, what election do you mean?'

'I mean the election to the Presidency of the Entomological Society, sir,' he creaked with an air of surprise, as if nobody could by any possibility have been thinking of any other. 'Great competition, sir, between the dipterists and the lepidopterists, as to which shall get in their candidate. Several close ballotings already; adjourned for a fortnight. Poor concerns both of 'em. Wait till our turn comes.'

'I suppose you are an entomologist?' I said, with a note of interrogation.

Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. A Society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.'

May I venture to ask,' I said, a little awed by his statement and manner, what is your special province of study?'

'I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,' he said, 'but I have no