has the pure flavour of American wit,--a wit which finds its most
audacious expression in burlesquing bitter things, and which misfits
its words with diabolic ingenuity. To match these alien jests, which
sound so like our own, we have the whispered warning of an American
usher (also quoted by Sir John Robinson) who opened the door to a
late comer at one of Mr. Matthew Arnold's lectures: "Will you please
make as little noise as you can, sir. The audience is asleep"; and
the comprehensive remark of a New England scholar and wit that he
never wanted to do anything in his life, that he did not find it was
expensive, unwholesome, or immoral. This last observation embraces
the wisdom of the centuries. Solomon would have endorsed it, and it
is supremely quotable as expressing a common experience with very
uncommon felicity.

When we leave the open field of exaggeration, that broad area which
is our chosen territory, and seek for subtler qualities in American
humour, we find here and there a witticism which, while admittedly
our own, has in it an Old-World quality. The epigrammatic remark of
a Boston woman that men get and forget, and women give and forgive,
shows the fine, sharp finish of Sydney Smith or Sheridan. A
Philadelphia woman's observation, that she knew there could be no
marriages in Heaven, because--"Well, women were there no doubt in
plenty, and some men; but not a man whom any woman would have," is
strikingly French. The word of a New York broker, when Mr. Roosevelt
sailed for Africa, "Wall Street expects every lion to do its duty!"
equals in brevity and malice the keen-edged satire of Italy. No
sharper thrust was ever made at prince or potentate.

The truth is that our love of a jest knows no limit and respects no
law. The incongruities of an unequal civilization (we live in the