A vast amount of American humour may be called local and middle-class.  In the youth of Dickens, there was a regular set of home-made middle-class jokes about babies, about washing-day, about mothers-in-law, about dinner-parties that were not successes, about curtain lectures, about feminine extravagance in bonnet-buying, about drunken men, about beer, all of them jokes worn threadbare.  A similar kind of fun, with local differences, prevails in the States, but is wonderfully mixed up with scriptural and religious jokes.  To us sober Britons, whatever our opinions, these latter japes appear more or less ribald, though they are quite innocently made.

Aristophanes, a pious conservative, was always laughing consumedly at the Greek gods, and the Greek gods were supposed to be in the joke.  The theatrical season was sacred to the deity of wine and fun, and he, with the other Olympians, was not scandalized by the merriment.  In the ages of faith it is also notorious that saints, and even more sacred persons, were habitually buffooned in the Mystery Plays, and the Church saw no harm.  The old leaven of American Puritanism has the same kind of familiarity with ideas and words which we approach more delicately, conscious that the place where we tread is holy ground.  This consciousness appears to be less present in the States, which are peopled by descendants of the Puritans, and scores of good things are told in “family” American journals and magazines which are received without a grin in this country.  “We are not amused,” a great person is reported to have once observed when some wit had ventured on a hazardous anecdote.  And we, meaning the people of England, are often not amused, but rather vexed, by gaieties which appear absolutely harmless on the other side of the ocean.  These two kinds of humour, the middle-class jokes about courting between lovers seated on a snake fence, or about Sunday schools and quaint answers there given to Biblical questions, leave us cold.

But surely we appreciate as well as the Americans themselves the extraordinarily intellectual high spirits of Mark Twain, a writer whose genius goes on mellowing, ripening, widening, and improving at an age when another man would have written himself out.  His gravity in narrating the most preposterous tale, his sympathy with every one of his absurdest characters, his microscopic imagination, his vein of seriousness, his contrasts of pathos, his bursts of indignant plain speaking about certain national errors, make Mark Twain an author of the highest merit, and far remote from the mere buffoon.  Say the “Jumping Frog” is buffoonery; perhaps it is, but Louis Quinze could not have classed the author among the people he did not love, les buffons qui ne me font rire.  The man is not to be envied who does not laugh over the ride on “The Genuine Mexican Plug” till he is almost as sore as the equestrian after that adventure.  Again, while studying the narrative