ard and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have
never read the _One-Hoss-Shay_ or the _Courtin'_. And though it {563}
would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank
with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness
and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts large
portions of their writings below the line where real literature begins,
still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict
that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary
fashion is more subject to change than the fashion of a jest, and that
jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there
is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the
great jester of France;" and though the puns of Shakspere's clowns are
detestable the clowns themselves have not lost their power to amuse.

The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke.
Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically Western, and it is
doubtful whether he was more endeared to the masses by his solid virtues
than by the humorous perception which made him one of them. The humor of
which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and national possession.
Though America has never, or not until lately, had a comic paper ranking
with _Punch_ or _Charivari_ or the _Fliegende Blaetter_, every newspaper
has had its funny column. Our humorists have been graduated from the
journalist's desk and sometimes from the printing-press, and now and then
a local or country newspaper has risen into sudden prosperity from the
possession of a {564} new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's
_Courier-Journal_, or more recently of the _Cleveland Plain Dealer_, the
_Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_, the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the
_Texas Siftings_ and numerous others. Nowadays there are even syndicates
of humorists, who co-operate to supply fun for certain groups of
periodicals. Of course the great majority of these manufacturers of
jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion.
But it is not so certain that the best of the class, like Clemens and
Browne, will not long continue to be read as illustrative of one side of
the American mind, or that their best things will not survive as long as
the mots of Sydney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the
earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under the name of M