Whatever humour there may be in this is lost for me by the actual and vivid picture that it conjures up—­the dying wife, the darkened room and the last whispered request.

No doubt the Scotch see things differently.  That wonderful people—­whom personally I cannot too much admire—­always seem to me to prefer adversity to sunshine, to welcome the prospect of a pretty general damnation, and to live with grim cheerfulness within the very shadow of death.  Alone among the nations they have converted the devil —­under such names as Old Horny—­into a familiar acquaintance not without a certain grim charm of his own.  No doubt also there enters into their humour something of the original barbaric attitude towards things.  For a primitive people who saw death often and at first hand, and for whom the future world was a vivid reality that could be felt, as it were, in the midnight forest and heard in the roaring storm, it was no doubt natural to turn the flank of terror by forcing a merry and jovial acquaintance with the unseen world.  Such a practice as a wake, and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still lived.  Our funeral with its black trappings and its elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a merry-making.  Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the death-dance.  Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings of death been transformed in the course of ages till the forced gaiety is gone, and the black hearse and the gloomy mutes betoken the cold dignity of our despair.

But I fear this article is getting serious.  I must apologise.

I was about to say, when I wandered from the point, that there is another form of humour which I am also quite unable to appreciate.  This is that particular form of story which may be called, par excellence, the English Anecdote.  It always deals with persons of rank and birth, and, except for the exalted nature of the subject itself, is, as far as I can see, absolutely pointless.

This is the kind of thing that I mean.

“His Grace the Fourth Duke of Marlborough was noted for the open-handed hospitality which reigned at Blenheim, the family seat, during his regime.  One day on going in to luncheon it was discovered that there were thirty guests present, whereas the table only held covers for twenty-one.  ‘Oh, well,’ said the Duke, not a whit abashed, ‘some of us will have to eat standing up.’  Everybody, of course, roared with laughter.”

My only wonder is that they didn’t kill themselves with it.  A mere roar doesn’t seem enough to do justice to such a story as this.

The Duke of Wellington has been made the storm-centre of three generations of wit of this sort.  In fact the typical Duke of Wellington story has been reduced to a thin skeleton such as this: