But the legend in reality is only a legend. If the English are
inferior to Americans in humour, I, for one, am at a loss to see
where it comes in. If there is anything on our continent superior
in humour to Punch I should like to see it. If we have any more
humorous writers in our midst than E. V. Lucas and Charles Graves
and Owen Seaman I should like to read what they write; and if there
is any audience capable of more laughter and more generous
appreciation than an audience in London, or Bristol, or Aberdeen,
I should like to lecture to it.

During my voyage of discovery in Great Britain I had very exceptional
opportunities for testing the truth of these comparisons. It was my
good fortune to appear as an avowed humourist in all the great
British cities. I lectured as far north as Aberdeen and as far south
as Brighton and Bournemouth; I travelled eastward to Ipswich and
westward into Wales. I spoke on serious subjects, but with a joke or
two in loco, at the universities, at business gatherings, and at
London dinners; I watched, lost in admiration, the inspired merriment
of the Savages of Adelphi Terrace, and in my moments of leisure I
observed, with a scientific eye, the gaieties of the London revues.
As a result of which I say with conviction that, speaking by and
large, the two communities are on the same level. A Harvard audience,
as I have reason gratefully to acknowledge, is wonderful. But an
Oxford audience is just as good. A gathering of business men in a
textile town in the Midlands is just as heavy as a gathering of
business men in Decatur, Indiana, but no heavier; and an audience of
English schoolboys as at Rugby or at Clifton is capable of a wild and
sustained merriment not to be outdone from Halifax to Los Angeles.