reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected that
such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous
incident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide
allusions. It is often a question which of several significant
trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who
does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the
way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few
years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few
years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to
himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its
unprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and this
American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt
following. We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure
them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy.

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain why
the little humour in _Elsie Venner_ and the _Breakfast Table_ series
is not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby he
relates this author to his following and to the world. The young man
John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and
her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic
personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good
enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But
that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that
temperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour
of it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth. Like
Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro, but
American; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until then she
had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at. 'Nature is