On his mother’s side, too, Browne was a thorough-bred New-Englander.  His maternal grandfather, Mr. Calvin Farrar, was a man of influence in town and State, and was able to send two of his sons to Bowdoin College.  I have mentioned Browne’s parentage because his humor is so essentially American.  Whether this consists in a peculiar gravity in the humorous attitude towards the subject, rather than playfulness, or in a tendency to exaggerated statement, or in a broad humanitarian standpoint, or in a certain flavor given by a blending of all these, it is very difficult to decide.  Probably the peculiar standpoint is the distinguishing note, and American humor is a product of democracy.

Humor is as difficult of definition as is poetry.  It is an intimate quality of the mind, which predisposes a man to look for remote and unreal analogies and to present them gravely as if they were valid.  It sees that many of the objects valued by men are illusions, and it expresses this conviction by assuming that other manifest trifles are important.  It is the deadly enemy of sentimentality and affectation, for its vision is clear.  Although it turns everything topsy-turvy in sport, its world is not a chaos nor a child’s play-ground, for humor is based on keen perception of truth.  There is no method—­except the highest poetic treatment—­which reveals so distinctly the falsehoods and hypocrisies of the social and economic order as the reductio ad absurdum of humor; for all human institutions have their ridiculous sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood.  But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may degenerate into the merely comic or amusing.  The laugh which true humor arouses is not far removed from tears.  Humor indeed is not always associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally dissociated from egotism, and is never more attractive than when, as in the case of Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, it is based on a loving and generous interest in humanity.

Humor, must rest on a broad human foundation, and cannot be narrowed to the notions of a certain class.  But in most English humor,—­as indeed in all English literature except the very highest,—­the social class to which the writer does not belong is regarded ab extra.  In Punch, for instance, not only are servants always given a conventional set of features, but they are given conventional minds, and the jokes are based on a hypothetical conception of personality.  Dickens was a great humorist, and understood the nature of the poor because he had been one of them; but his gentlemen and ladies are lay figures.  Thackeray’s studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him qua flunky, as a naturalist might study an animal, and hardly