which are received without a
grin in this country. "We are not amused," a great person is reported to
have once observed when some wit had ventured on a hazardous anecdote.
And we, meaning the people of England, are often not amused, but rather
vexed, by gaieties which appear absolutely harmless on the other side of
the ocean. These two kinds of humour, the middle-class jokes about
courting between lovers seated on a snake fence, or about Sunday schools
and quaint answers there given to Biblical questions, leave us cold.

But surely we appreciate as well as the Americans themselves the
extraordinarily intellectual high spirits of Mark Twain, a writer whose
genius goes on mellowing, ripening, widening, and improving at an age
when another man would have written himself out. His gravity in
narrating the most preposterous tale, his sympathy with every one of his
absurdest characters, his microscopic imagination, his vein of
seriousness, his contrasts of pathos, his bursts of indignant plain
speaking about certain national errors, make Mark Twain an author of the
highest merit, and far remote from the mere buffoon. Say the "Jumping
Frog" is buffoonery; perhaps it is, but Louis Quinze could not have
classed the author among the people he did not love, _les buffons qui ne
me font rire_. The man is not to be envied who does not laugh over the
ride on "The Genuine Mexican Plug" till he is almost as sore as the
equestrian after that adventure. Again, while studying the narrative of
how Mark edited an agricultural paper in a country district, a person
with any sense of humour is scarcely a responsible being. He is quite
unfit (so doth he revel in laughter uncontrollable) for the society of
staid people, and he ought to be ejected from club libraries, where his
shouts waken the bald-headed sleepers of these retreats. It is one
example of what we have tried to urge, that "Mark's way" is not nearly so
acceptable in "The Innocents Abroad," especially when the Innocents get
to the Holy Land. We think it in bad taste, for example, to snigger over
the Siege of Samaria, and the discomfiture of "shoddy speculators" in
curious articles of food during that great leaguer. Recently Mark Twain
has shown in his Mississippi sketches, in "Tom Sawyer," and in
"Hucklebury Finn," that he can paint a landscape, that he can describe
life, that he can tell a story as well as the very best, and all without
losing the gift of laughter. His tra