literary humour, a rich soil in which the plant cultivated by Mark Twain
and Mr. Frank Stockton grows with vigour and puts forth fruit and
flowers. Mr. Stockton is very unlike Mark Twain: he is quiet,
domesticated, the jester of the family circle. Yet he has shown in
"Rudder Grange," and in "The Transferred Ghost," very great powers, and a
pleasant, dry kind of Amontillado flavour in his fun, which somewhat
reminds one of Thackeray--the Thackeray of the "Bedford-row Conspiracy"
and of "A Little Dinner at Timmins." Mr. Stockton's vein is a little too
connubial--a little too rich in the humours and experiences of young
married people. But his fun is rarely strained or artificial, except in
the later chapters of "Rudder Grange," and he has a certain kindliness
and tenderness not to be always met with in the jester. His angling and
hunting pieces are excellent, and so are those of Mr. Charles Dudley
Warner. This humorist (like Alceste) was once "funnier than he had
supposed," when he sat down with a certain classical author, to study the
topography of Epipolae. But his talent is his own, and very agreeable,
though he once so forgot himself as to jest on the Deceased Wife's
Sister. When we think of those writers to whom we all owe so much, it
would be sheer ingratitude to omit the name of the master of them all,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is a wit who is a scholar, and almost a
poet, and whose humour is none the less precious for being accompanied by
good humour, learning, a wide experience of the world. With Mr. Lowell,
he belongs to an older generation, yet reigns among the present. May the
reign be long!



SHOW SUNDAY.