full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, "Should I be in
order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that
when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?" Here is a glorious
example of Irish humour--the bull not unconscious, not entirely
conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can
hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would
have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman's
humour would have been logical: he would have said, "The orator
denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a
good example!" What the Scotchman's humour would have said I am not so
certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability
of making such speeches on top of someone else's hat. But American
humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The
American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat
down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one
crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to
speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the
House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the
debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised
by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the
subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither
unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and
appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of
realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.
It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of
heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.

With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing
in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine
qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two