reaches them only with great
difficulty, and that a British audience listens to humour in gloomy and
unintelligent silence. People still love to repeat the famous story of
how John Bright listened attentively to Artemus Ward's lecture in
London and then said, gravely, that he "doubted many of the young man's
statements"; and readers still remember Mark Twain's famous parody of
the discussion of his book by a wooden-headed reviewer of an English
review.

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.

There is, however, one vital difference between American and English
audiences which would be apt to discourage at the outset any American
lecturer who might go to England. The English audiences, from the nature
of the way in which they have