contains nothing but merriment--a fearful idea! We
have nothing like this at home, and as for writers who make a reader
giggle almost indelicately often, where are they to be found? "Happy
Thoughts" affect some of us in this way; others are convulsed by "Vice
Versa;" but, as George Eliot says, nothing is such a strain on the
affections as a difference of taste in jokes. It is unsafe to recommend
any writer as very funny. No man can ever tell how his neighbour will
take a joke. But it may safely be said that authors who really tickle
their students are extremely rare in England, except as writers for the
stage, and surely "The Great Pink Pearl" might have made Timon of Athens
shake his sides, or might convert a Veddah to the belief that "there is
something to laugh at." In literature, when we want to be even
hysterically diverted, we must, as a rule, buy our fun from the American
humorists. If we cannot make laughter ourselves, at least we can, and
do, laugh with them.

A vast amount of American humour may be called local and middle-class. In
the youth of Dickens, there was a regular set of home-made middle-class
jokes about babies, about washing-day, about mothers-in-law, about dinner-
parties that were not successes, about curtain lectures, about feminine
extravagance in bonnet-buying, about drunken men, about beer, all of them
jokes worn threadbare. A similar kind of fun, with local differences,
prevails in the States, but is wonderfully mixed up with scriptural and
religious jokes. To us sober Britons, whatever our opinions, these
latter japes appear more or less ribald, though they are quite innocently
made.

Aristophanes, a pious conservative, was always laughing consumedly at the
Greek gods, and the Greek gods were supposed to be in the joke. The
theatrical season was sacred to the deity of wine and fun, and he, with
the other Olympians, was not scandalized by the merriment. In the ages
of faith it is also notorious that saints, and even more sacred persons,
were habitually buffooned in the Mystery Plays, and the Church saw no
harm. The old leaven of American Puritanism has the same kind of
familiarity with ideas and words which we approach more delicately,
conscious that the place where we tread is holy ground. This
consciousness appears to be less present in the States, which are peopled
by descendants of the Puritans, and scores of good things are told in
"family" American journals and magazines