d. German ennui must be something as
superlative as Barclay's treble X, which, we suppose, implies an
extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction.

It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception
must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of
Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you
that what they think most admirable in him is his _Wortspiel_, his verbal
quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement,
once cited to a friend of ours Proteus's joke in "The Two Gentlemen of
Verona"--"Nod I? why that's Noddy," as a transcendant specimen of
Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners,
and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up _Kladderadatsch_,
the German Punch, without any danger of agitating his facial muscles.
Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races
concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which,
up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common
stock of European wit and humor; for _Reineke Fuchs_ cannot be regarded
as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime
and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had
produced Rabelais and Moliere, and classic wits innumerable; England had
yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no
great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired
the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order.
Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically
witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit--the "flavor of
mind"--throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent
satire, as every reader of the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ remembers.
Still Lessing's name has not become European through his wit, and his
charming comedy, _Minna von Barnhelm_, has won no place on a foreign
stage. Of course we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with
German literature; we not only admit--we are sure that it includes much
comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that
no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as
European; a fact which does not, indeed, determine the _amount_ of the
national facetiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its _quality_.
Whatever may be the stock of fun which Germany yi