“And I said, ‘Why is this thus?  What is the reason of this thusness?’ They hove a sigh—­seventeen sighs of different size.  They said: 

“‘O, soon thou will be gonested away.’

“I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested.

“They said, ‘Doth not like us?’

“I said, ‘I doth—­I doth.’

“I also said, ’I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone child—­my parents being far—­far away.’

“They then said, ‘Wilt not marry us?’

“I said, ‘O no, it cannot was.’

“When they cried, ‘O cruel man! this is too much!—­O! too much,’ I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined.”

It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and another, or of one nation and another.  It can be felt and can be illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general terms.  It has been said of that class of American humorists of which Artemus Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence.  But all these qualities have characterized other schools of humor.  There is the same element of surprise in De Quincey’s anti-climax, “Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little of,” as in Artemus’s truism that “a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and then.”  The violation of logic which makes us laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus’s saying of Jeff Davis, that “it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never been born;” or in his advice, “Always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;” or, again, in his announcement that “Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his own contracting.”  A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham Young, “He’s the most married man I ever saw in my life;” or when, having been drafted at several hundred different places where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went on he should soon become a regiment, and adds, “I never knew that there was so many of me.”  With this a whimsical understatement and an affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice “even his wife’s relations” on the altar of patriotism; or where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against orthography, he pronounces that “Chaucer was a great poet but he couldn’t spell,” or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, “It don’t agree with me.  I prefer simple food.”  On the whole, it may be said of original humor of this kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, that the elements of it are old, but their combinations are novel.  Other humorists, like Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings”) and David R. Locke ("Petroleum