tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and
Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a
touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often
nothing more than a disdainful trifling with death; they seize the comic
side of manslaughter very promptly, and enjoy all the mirth that can be
got out of revolvers and grizzly bears. In Mr. Bret Harte's poems of
"The Spelling Bee" and of "The Break-up of the Society upon the
Stanislaw," the fun is of this practical sort. The innate mirthfulness
of a chunk of old red sandstone is illustrated, and you are introduced to
people who not only take delight of battle with their peers, but think
the said battle the most killing joke in the world. The incongruities of
these revels of wild men in a new world; their confusion when
civilization meets them in the shape of a respectable woman or of a baby;
their grotesque way of clinging to religion, as they understand it, make
up the transatlantic element in this American humour. The rest of it is
"European quite," though none the worse for that. It is more humane, on
the whole, than the laughable and amazing paradoxes of Mark Twain, or the
_naivetes_ of Artemus Ward.

Two remarkable features in American humour, as it is shown in the great
body of comic writers who are represented by Mark Twain and the "Genial
Showman," are its rusticity and its puritanism. The fun is the fun of
rough villagers, who use quaint, straightforward words, and have
developed, or carried over in the _Mayflower_, a slang of their own. They
do not want anything too refined; they are not in the least like the farm-
lad to whose shirt a serpent clung as he was dressing after bathing. Many
people have read how he fled into the farm-yard, where the maidens were
busy; how he did not dare to stop, and sought escape, not from woman's
help--he was too modest--but in running so fast that, obedient to the
laws of centrifugal motion, the snake waved out behind him like a flag.