The method of this whole class of humorists is the opposite of Addison’s or Irving’s or Thackeray’s.  It does not amuse by the perception of the characteristic.  It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness.  Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the natural order of things.  Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world is in their debt for many a hearty laugh.

In the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, appeared a tale entitled The Man Without a Country, which made a great sensation, and did much to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the darkest hours of the nation’s history.  It was the story of one Philip Nolan, an army officer, whose head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been censured by a court-martial for some minor offense; exclaimed petulantly, upon mention being made of the United States government, “Damn the United States!  I wish that I might never hear the United States mentioned again.”  Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent off on long voyages and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in charge that his country and its concerns should never be spoken of in his presence.  Such an air of reality was given to the narrative by incidental references to actual persons and occurrences that many believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip Nolan, but had heard different versions of his career.  The author of this clever hoax—­if hoax it may be called—­was Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in 1868, under the fantastic title, If, Yes, and Perhaps, indicating thereby that some of the tales were possible, some of them probable, and others might even be regarded as essentially true.  A similar collection, His Level Best, and Other Stories, was published in 1873, and in the interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind, the Ingham Papers and Sybaris and Other Homes, both in 1869, and Ten Times One Is Ten, in 187l.  The author shelters himself behind the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, and the same characters have a way of re-appearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a little tiresome.  Mr. Hale is one of the most original and ingenious of American story-writers.  The old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment of details—­a device employed by Swift and Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne—­became quite fresh and novel in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his own.  Some of his best stories are My Double and How He Undid Me, describing how a busy clergyman found an Irishman who looked