of the Kangaroo, that “amoosin’ little cuss,” and of the “two moral B’ars.”  But it is vain to attempt to analyze the fun of Artemus Ward.  Why did he make some people laugh till they cried, while others were all untouched?  His secret probably was almost entirely one of manner, a trick of almost idiotic naivete, like that of Lord Dundreary, covering real shrewdness.  He had his rustic chaff, his Puritan profanity; his manner was the essence of his mirth.  It was one of the ultimate constituents of the ludicrous, beyond which it is useless to inquire.

With Mark Twain we are on smoother ground.  An almost Mephistophilean coolness, an unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possibilities of the sublime,—­these, with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration, make up his stock-in-trade.  The colossal exaggeration is, of course, natural to a land of ocean-like rivers and almighty tall pumpkins.  No one has made such charming use of the trick as Mark Twain.  The dryness of the story of a greenhorn’s sufferings who had purchased “a genuine Mexican plug,” is one of the funniest things in literature.  The intense gravity and self-pity of the sufferer, the enormous and Gargantuan feats of his steed, the extreme distress of body thence resulting, make up a passage more moving than anything in Rabelais.  The same contrast, between an innocent style of narrative and the huge palpable nonsense of the story told, marks the tale of the agricultural newspaper which Mr. Twain edited.  To a joker of jokes of this sort, a tour through Palestine presented irresistible attractions.  It is when we read of the “Innocents Abroad” that we discern the weak point of American humour when carried to its extreme.  Here, indeed, is the place where the most peculiarly American fun has always failed.  It has lacked reverence and sympathy, and so, when it was most itself, never approached the masterpieces of Thackeray and Dickens.  To balance its defect by its merit, American humour has always dared to speak out, and Mark Twain especially has hit hard the errors of public opinion and the dishonest compromises of custom.

SUSPENDED ANIMATION.

It used to be thought that a man who said he liked dry champagne would say anything.  In the same way, some persons may hold that a person who could believe in the recurrent Australian story of “suspended animation”—­artificially produced in animals, and prolonged for months—­could believe in anything.  It does not do, however, to be too dogmatic about matters of opinion in this world.  Perhaps the Australian tale of an invention by which sheep and oxen are first made lifeless, then rendered “stiff ones” by freezing, and then restored to life, and reproduced with gravy, may be like the genius of Beethoven.  Very few persons (and these artists) believed in Beethoven at first, but now he is often considered to be the greatest