thing a newspaper misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi
et orbos," or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was
some further point in it that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't
funny. Neither is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes,
says Archimeeds; why shouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English
scale of values in these things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can
pronounce Chicago properly and they think nothing of that. But if a
person mispronounces the name of a Greek village of what O. Henry
called "The Year B.C." it is supposed to be excruciatingly funny.

I think in reality that this is only a part of the overdone
scholarship that haunts so much of English writing--not the best of
it, but a lot of it. It is too full of allusions and indirect
references to all sorts of extraneous facts. The English writer finds
it hard to say a plain thing in a plain way. He is too anxious to
show in every sentence what a fine scholar he is. He carries in his
mind an accumulated treasure of quotations, allusions, and scraps and
tags of history, and into this, like Jack Horner, he must needs
"stick in his thumb and pull out a plum." Instead of saying, "It is a
fine morning," he prefers to write, "This is a day of which one might
say with the melancholy Jacques, it is a fine morning."

Hence it is that many plain American readers find English humour
"highbrow." Just as the English are apt to find our humour "slangy"
and "cheap," so we find theirs academic and heavy. But the difference,
after all, is of far less moment than might be supposed. It lies
only on the surface. Fundamentally, as I said in starting, the
humour of the two peoples is of the same kind and on an equal level.

There is one form of humour which the English have more or less to