have heard of
Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he dead?" It is
Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions--Europe seen by a Western
newspaper reporter without any "historic imagination."

The method of this whole class of humorists is the opposite of Addison's
or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the
characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity,
distortion, unexpectedness. Everything in life is reversed, as in opera
bouffe, and turned topsy turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the
natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome
criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world is in their debt for
many a hearty laugh.

In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for December, 1863, appeared a tale entitled
the _Man Without a Country_, which made a great sensation, and did much
to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the
nation's history. It was the story of one Philip Nolan, an army officer,
whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been censured
by a court-martial for some minor offense, exclaimed, petulantly, upon
{572} mention being made of the United States Government, "Damn the
United States! I wish that I might never hear the United States
mentioned again." Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, and was
kept all his life aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent off on long
voyages and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in charge
that his country and its concerns should never be spoken of in his
presence. Such an air of reality, was given to the narrative by
incidental references to actual persons and occurrences that many
believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip Nolan, but
had heard different versions of his career. The author of this clever
hoax--if hoax it may be called--was Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian
clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in 1868, under
the fantastic title, _If, Yes, and Perhaps_, indicating thereby that some
of the tales were possible, some of them probable, and others might even
be regarded as essentially true. A similar collection, _His Level Best
and Other Stories_ was published in 1873, and in the interval three
volumes of a somewhat different kind, the _Ingham Papers_ and _Sybaris
and Other Homes_, both in 1869, and _Ten Times One Is Ten_, in 1871. The
author shelters himself behind