Woodbridge ladies
offered an indignant denial. When Dr. Thompson, the witty master of
Trinity, observed of an undergraduate that "all the time he could
spare from the neglect of his duties he gave to the adornment of his
person," the sarcasm made its slow way into print; whereupon an
intelligent British reader wrote to the periodical which had printed
it, and explained painstakingly that, inasmuch as it was not possible
to spare time from the neglect of anything, the criticism was
inaccurate.

Exaggeration of phrase, as well as the studied understatement which
is an even more effective form of ridicule, seem natural products
of American humour. They sound, wherever we hear them, familiar to
our ears. It is hard to believe that an English barrister, and not
a Texas ranch-man, described Boston as a town where respectability
stalked unchecked. Mazarin's plaintive reflection, "Nothing is so
disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged," carries with it an echo of
Wyoming or Arizona. Mr. Gilbert's analysis of Hamlet's mental
disorder,--

"Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy,"--

has the pure flavour of American wit,--a wit which finds its most
audacious expression in burlesquing bitter things, and which misfits
its words with diabolic ingenuity. To match these alien jests, which
sound so like our own, we have the whispered warning of an American
usher (also quoted by Sir John Robinson) who opened the door to a
late comer at one of Mr. Matthew Arnold's lectures: "Will you please
make as little noise as you can, sir. The audience is asleep"; and
the comprehensive remark of a New England scholar and wit that he
never wanted to do anything in his life, that he did not find it was
expensive, unwholesome, or immoral. This last observation embraces
the wisdom of the centuries. Solomon would have endorsed it, and it
is supremely quotable as expressing a common experience with very
uncommon felicity.

When we leave the open field of exaggeration, that broad area which
is our chosen territory, and seek for subtler qualities in American
humour, we find here and there a witticism which, while admittedly
our own, has in it an Old-World quality. The epigrammatic remark of
a Boston woman that men get and forget, and women give and forgive,
shows the fine, sharp finish of Sydney Smith or Sheridan. A
Philadelphia woman's observation, that she knew there could be no
marriages in Heaven, because--"Well, women wer