known to illuminate. It is not for such asperities that we have
perfected through the ages the priceless gift of language, that we
seek to meet one another in the pleasant comradeship of life.




The Mission of Humour

"Laughter is my object: 'tis a property
In man, essential to his reason."
THOMAS RANDOLPH, _The Muses' Looking-Glass_.


American humour is the pride of American hearts. It is held to
be our splendid national characteristic, which we flaunt in the faces
of other nations, conceiving them to have been less favoured by
Providence. Just as the most effective way to disparage an author
or an acquaintance--and we have often occasion to disparage both--is
to say that he lacks a sense of humour, so the most effective
criticism we can pass upon a nation is to deny it this valuable
quality. American critics have written the most charming things
about the keenness of American speech, the breadth and insight of
American drollery, the electric current in American veins; and we,
reading these pleasant felicitations, are wont to thank God with
greater fervour than the occasion demands that we are more merry and
wise than our neighbours. Mr. Brander Matthews, for example, has told
us that there are newspaper writers in New York who have cultivated
a wit, "not unlike Voltaire's." He mistrusts this wit because he
finds it "corroding and disintegrating"; but he makes the comparison