ization meets them in the shape of a respectable woman or of a baby;
their grotesque way of clinging to religion, as they understand it, make
up the transatlantic element in this American humour. The rest of it is
"European quite," though none the worse for that. It is more humane, on
the whole, than the laughable and amazing paradoxes of Mark Twain, or the
_naivetes_ of Artemus Ward.

Two remarkable features in American humour, as it is shown in the great
body of comic writers who are represented by Mark Twain and the "Genial
Showman," are its rusticity and its puritanism. The fun is the fun of
rough villagers, who use quaint, straightforward words, and have
developed, or carried over in the _Mayflower_, a slang of their own. They
do not want anything too refined; they are not in the least like the farm-
lad to whose shirt a serpent clung as he was dressing after bathing. Many
people have read how he fled into the farm-yard, where the maidens were
busy; how he did not dare to stop, and sought escape, not from woman's
help--he was too modest--but in running so fast that, obedient to the
laws of centrifugal motion, the snake waved out behind him like a flag.
The village wits are not so shy. The young ladies, like Betsy Ward, say,
"If you mean getting hitched, I'm on." The public is not above the most
practical jokes, and a good deal of the amusement is derived from the
extreme dryness, the countrified slowness of the narrative. The
humorists are Puritans at bottom, as well as rustics. They have an
amazing familiarity with certain religious ideas and certain Biblical
terms. There is a kind of audacity in their use of the Scriptures, which
reminds one of the freedom of mediaeval mystery-plays. Probably this
boldness began, not in scepticism or in irreverence, but in honest
familiar faith. It certainly seems very odd to us in England, and
probably expressions often get a laugh which would pass unnoticed in
America. An astounding coolness and freedom of manners probably go for
something in the effect produced by American humour. There is nothing of
the social flunkeyism in it which too often marks our own satirists.
Artemus Ward's reports of his own conversations with the mighty of the
earth were made highly ludicrous by the homely want of self-consciousness,
displayed by the owner of the Kangaroo, that "amoosin' little cuss," and
of the "two moral B'ars." But it is vain to attempt to analyze the fun
of Artemus