of how Mark edited an agricultural paper in a country district, a person with any sense of humour is scarcely a responsible being.  He is quite unfit (so doth he revel in laughter uncontrollable) for the society of staid people, and he ought to be ejected from club libraries, where his shouts waken the bald-headed sleepers of these retreats.  It is one example of what we have tried to urge, that “Mark’s way” is not nearly so acceptable in “The Innocents Abroad,” especially when the Innocents get to the Holy Land.  We think it in bad taste, for example, to snigger over the Siege of Samaria, and the discomfiture of “shoddy speculators” in curious articles of food during that great leaguer.  Recently Mark Twain has shown in his Mississippi sketches, in “Tom Sawyer,” and in “Hucklebury Finn,” that he can paint a landscape, that he can describe life, that he can tell a story as well as the very best, and all without losing the gift of laughter.  His travel-books are his least excellent; he is happiest at home, in the country of his own Blue Jay.

The contrasts, the energy, the mixture of races in America, the overflowing young life of the continent, doubtless give its humorists the richness of its vein.  All over the land men are eternally “swopping stories” at bars, and in the long, endless journeys by railway and steamer.  How little, comparatively, the English “swop stories”!  The Scotch are almost as much addicted as the Americans to this form of barter, so are the Irish.  The Englishman has usually a dignified dread of dropping into his “anecdotage.”

The stories thus collected in America are the subsoil of American literary humour, a rich soil in which the plant cultivated by Mark Twain and Mr. Frank Stockton grows with vigour and puts forth fruit and flowers.  Mr. Stockton is very unlike Mark Twain:  he is quiet, domesticated, the jester of the family circle.  Yet he has shown in “Rudder Grange,” and in “The Transferred Ghost,” very great powers, and a pleasant, dry kind of Amontillado flavour in his fun, which somewhat reminds one of Thackeray—­the Thackeray of the “Bedford-row Conspiracy” and of “A Little Dinner at Timmins.”  Mr. Stockton’s vein is a little too connubial—­a little too rich in the humours and experiences of young married people.  But his fun is rarely strained or artificial, except in the later chapters of “Rudder Grange,” and he has a certain kindliness and tenderness not to be always met with in the jester.  His angling and hunting pieces are excellent, and so are those of Mr. Charles Dudley Warner.  This humorist (like Alceste) was once “funnier than he had supposed,” when he sat down with a certain classical author, to study the topography of Epipolae.  But his talent is his own, and very agreeable, though he once so forgot himself as to jest on the Deceased Wife’s Sister.  When we think of those writers to whom we all owe so much, it would be sheer ingratitude to omit the name of the master of them all, Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Here is a wit who is a scholar, and almost a poet, and whose humour is none the less precious for being accompanied by good humour, learning, a wide experience of the world.  With Mr. Lowell, he belongs to an older generation, yet reigns among the present.  May the reign be long!