_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit,
which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. The same
is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_, though
humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, are
essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the
hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character,
as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They
are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these
writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave
fineness and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of
life was not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of jesters,
of professional humorists, in America, whose product is so indigenous,
so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression,
from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition
to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in
England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes
who have never read the _One Hoss-Shay_ or _The Courtin'_. And though
it 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
Shakespeare'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 h