statement, the remark of an American in London that his dining-room
ceiling was so low that he could not have anything for dinner but
soles. Sir John thought this could have been said only by an American,
only by one accustomed to have a joke swiftly catalogued as a joke,
and suffered to pass. An English jester must always take into account
the mental attitude which finds "Gulliver's Travels" "incredible."
When Mr. Edward FitzGerald said that the church at Woodbridge was
so damp that fungi grew about the communion rail, Woodbridge ladies
offered an indignant denial. When Dr. Thompson, the witty master of
Trinity, observed of an undergraduate that "all the time he could
spare from the neglect of his duties he gave to the adornment of his
person," the sarcasm made its slow way into print; whereupon an
intelligent British reader wrote to the periodical which had printed
it, and explained painstakingly that, inasmuch as it was not possible
to spare time from the neglect of anything, the criticism was
inaccurate.

Exaggeration of phrase, as well as the studied understatement which
is an even more effective form of ridicule, seem natural products
of American humour. They sound, wherever we hear them, familiar to
our ears. It is hard to believe that an English barrister, and not
a Texas ranch-man, described Boston as a town where respectability
stalked unchecked. Mazarin's plaintive reflection, "Nothing is so
disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged," carries with it an echo of
Wyoming or Arizona. Mr. Gilbert's analysis of Hamlet's mental
disorder,--

"Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy,"--