lent laugh." He was obliged to laugh silently for fear of
attracting the unfavourable notice of the Mingo, who might be hiding in
the nearest bush. The red men found it simpler and safer not to laugh at
all. No, it is not from the natives that the people of the States get
their peculiar fun. As to the German emigrants--But why pursue the
subject? The Abbe Bouhours told the bitter truth about German wit,
though, in new conditions and on a fresh soil, the Teuton has helped to
produce Hans Breitmann. We laugh at Hans, however, and with his creator.
Hans does not make us laugh by conscious efforts of humour. Whence,
then, come Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Mr. Bret Harte, who are probably
the American humorists whose popularity is widest? Mr. Bret Harte's own
fun is much more English and less thoroughly Yankee than that of his
contemporaries. He is a disciple of Thackeray and Dickens. Of all the
pupils of Dickens he is perhaps the only one who has continued to be
himself, who has not fallen into a trick of aping his master's
mannerisms. His mixture of the serious, the earnest, the pathetic, makes
his humour not unlike the melancholy mirth of Thackeray and Sterne. He
is almost the only American humorist with sentiment. It is only the air,
not the spirit, that is changed--_coelum non animus_.

The changed atmosphere, the new conditions, do, however, make an immense
superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that
of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough
people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected
tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and
Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a
touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often
nothing more than a disdainful trifling with death; they seize the comic
side of manslaughter very promptly, and enjoy all the mirth that can be
got out of revolvers and grizzly bears. In Mr. Bret Harte's poems of
"The Spelling Bee" and of "The Break-up of the Society upon the
Stanislaw," the fun is of this practical sort. The innate mirthfulness
of a chunk of old red sandstone is illustrated, and you are introduced to
people who not only take delight of battle with their peers, but think
the said battle the most killing joke in the world. The incongruities of
these revels of wild men in a new world; their confusion when
civil