One of the most popular of American humorists has elicited from a member of an English audience, who did not quite hear him lecture, a remark of an amusing sort.  The aggrieved listener proclaimed that he “had a right to hear.”  This was one of the turbulent people who should read Mazzini, and learn that man has no rights worth mentioning—­only duties, one of which is to hold his tongue in season.  If Mr. Bret Harte’s words did not reach all his audience, his writings at least have come home to most English readers.  They suggest a consideration of the many points of difference which distinguish American from English humour.  The Americans are of our own stock, yet in their treatment of the ludicrous how unlike us they are!  As far as fun goes, the race has certainly become “differentiated,” as the philosophers say, on the other side of the Atlantic.  It does not seem probable that the infusion of alien blood has caused the difference.  The native redskin can claim few descendants among the civilized Americans, and the native redskin had no sense of humour.  We all remember Cooper’s Hawk-eye or Leather Stocking, with his “peculiar silent laugh.”  He was obliged to laugh silently for fear of attracting the unfavourable notice of the Mingo, who might be hiding in the nearest bush.  The red men found it simpler and safer not to laugh at all.  No, it is not from the natives that the people of the States get their peculiar fun.  As to the German emigrants—­But why pursue the subject?  The Abbe Bouhours told the bitter truth about German wit, though, in new conditions and on a fresh soil, the Teuton has helped to produce Hans Breitmann.  We laugh at Hans, however, and with his creator.  Hans does not make us laugh by conscious efforts of humour.  Whence, then, come Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Mr. Bret Harte, who are probably the American humorists whose popularity is widest?  Mr. Bret Harte’s own fun is much more English and less thoroughly Yankee than that of his contemporaries.  He is a disciple of Thackeray and Dickens.  Of all the pupils of Dickens he is perhaps the only one who has continued to be himself, who has not fallen into a trick of aping his master’s mannerisms.  His mixture of the serious, the earnest, the pathetic, makes his humour not unlike the melancholy mirth of Thackeray and Sterne.  He is almost the only American humorist with sentiment.  It is only the air, not the spirit, that is changed—­coelum non animus.

The changed atmosphere, the new conditions, do, however, make an immense superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers.  His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time.  The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness.  Their humour is often