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 civilization 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