compelled to turn to _Ally Sloper_.

The best American comic paper is _Life_, which is modelled on the
lines of the _Münchener Fliegende Blätter_, perhaps the funniest and
most mirth-provoking of all professedly humorous weeklies. Among the
most attractive features are the graceful and dignified drawings of
Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, who has in its pages done for American
society what Mr. Du Maurier has done for England by his scenes in
_Punch_; the sketches of F.G. Attwood and S.W. Van Schaick; and the
clever verses of M.E.W. The dryness, the smart exaggeration, the
point, the unexpectedness of American humour are all often admirably
represented in its pages; and the faults and foibles of contemporary
society are touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in
pencil and pen work. _Life_, like _Punch_, has also its more serious
side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns
our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes,
its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent
tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other
hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which
considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it
sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which
no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard--for a
British critic at any rate--to see any perennial interest in the long
series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the
gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare
_motifs_ are constantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And
occasionally--very occasionally--there is a touch of coarseness in the
drawings of _Life_ which suggests the worst features of its German
prototype rather than anything it has borrowed from England.