“The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
    Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
  New birth of our new soil, the first American.”

Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American humor has reached its culmination.  Every man of genius who is a humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself.  There is no lack of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application they are not new in kind.  Irving, as we have seen, was the literary descendant of Addison.  The character-sketches in Bracebridge Hall are of the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures of the Spectator Club. Knickerbocker’s History of New York, though purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in the Voyage to Lilliput.  Irving’s humor, like that of all the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of character—­of the characteristic traits of men and classes of men, as ground of amusement.  It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray.  This perception of the characteristic, when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and caricature, as in some of Dickens’s inferior creations, which are little more than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature, or dress.  Hawthorne’s rare humor differed from Irving’s in temper but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving’s, to the English variety.  Dr. Holmes’s more pronouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically from the facetiae of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart.  The same is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose Biglow Papers, though humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, are essentially satirical.  It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in the Biglow Papers, their logical, that is, witty character, as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention.  They are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart.  In all these writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave fineness and literary value to their humorous writings.  Their view of life was not exclusively comic.  But there has been a class of jesters, of professional humorists, in America, whose product is so indigenous, so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic literature of the world.  It has been accepted as such in England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have never read the One Hoss-Shay or The Courtin’.  And though it would be ridiculous