To which the Boston girl: "Well, whose trunk was it?" We agreed, _nem.
con._, that this was indeed _Anglis ipsis Anglior_.

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English and American
humour must be understood as referring to the average man in each
case--the "Man on the Cars," as our cousins have it. It would be a
very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the
land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the
land of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic papers it may also be
doubted, even by those who most appreciate American humour, whether
England has altogether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the
States to speak of "poor old _Punch_," and to affect astonishment at
seeing in its "senile pages" anything that they have to admit to be
funny. Doubtless a great deal of very laborious and vapid jesting goes
on in the pages of the _doyen_ of English comic weeklies; but at its
best _Punch_ is hard to beat, and its humours have often a literary
quality such as is seldom met with in an American journal of the same
kind. No American paper can even remotely claim to have added so much
to the gaiety of nations as the pages that can number names like Leech
and Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold and Tom Hood, Burnand and Charles
Keene, Du Maurier and Tenniel, Linley Sambourne and the author of
"Vice Versâ," among its contributors past and present. And
besides--and the claim is a proud one--_Punch_ still remains the only
comic paper of importance that is always a perfect gentleman--a
gentleman who knows how to behave both in the smoking-room and the
drawing-room, who knows when a jest oversteps the boundary line of
coarseness, who realises that a laugh can sometimes be too dearly won.
_Punch_ is certainly a comic journal of which the English have every
reason to be proud; but if we had to name the paper most typical of
the English taste in humour we should, perhaps, be shamefacedly