f the _Spectator_. He produced humorous fables and
apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage,
which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the
so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest
salons of Paris in the age when the old regime went tottering, talking,
quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter
to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the
perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian,
although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by
Horace or Voltaire.

The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of
urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin.
Does not the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ itself presuppose the
existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone--"As I was saying
when I was interrupted"--is the tone of the intimate circle. There was
so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born
outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston
felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a
humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis
had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment
upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a
loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that
many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose
writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of
life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is
indistinguishable in tone--though its materials are so different--from
that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On
its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary
adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more
evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of
workmanship.

But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be
imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of
Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the
heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the
beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of
his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take,
for example, some of the apot