parts of the house; and, finally, a simultaneous roar.  So, when Mr. John Morley, in his admirable lecture on the Carlyle centenary celebration (Dec. 5, 1895), quoted Carlyle’s saying about Sterling:  “We talked about this thing and that—­except in opinion not disagreeing,” there was a lapse of half-a-minute before the audience realised that the saying had a humorous turn.  In an American audience, and I believe also in a Scottish one, the report would have been simultaneous with the flash.

Perhaps the Americans themselves are just a little too sure of their superiority to the English in point of humour, and indeed they often carry their witticisms on the supposed English “obtuseness” to a point at which exaggeration ceases to be funny.  It is certainly not every American who scoffs at English wit that is entitled to do so.  There are dullards in the United States as well as elsewhere; and nothing can well be more ghastly than American humour run into the ground.  On the other hand their sense of loyalty to humour makes them much more free in using it at their own expense; and some of their stories show themselves up in the light usually reserved for John Bull.  I remember, unpatriotically, telling a stock story (to illustrate the English slowness to take a joke) to an American writer whose pictures of New England life are as full of a delicate sense of humour as they are of real and simple pathos.  It was, perhaps, the tale of the London bookseller who referred to his own coiffure the American’s remark apropos of the two-volume English edition of a well-known series of “Walks in London”—­“Ah, I see you part your Hare in the middle.”  Whatever it was, my hearer at once capped it by the reply of a Boston girl to her narration of the following anecdote:  A railway conductor, on his way through the cars to collect and check the tickets, noticed a small hair-trunk lying in the forbidden central gangway, and told the old farmer to whom it apparently belonged that it must be moved from there at once.  On a second round he found the trunk still in the passage, reiterated his instructions more emphatically, and passed on without listening to the attempted explanations of the farmer.  On his third round he cried:  “Now, I gave you fair warning; here goes;” and tipped the trunk overboard.  Then, at last, the slow-moving farmer found utterance and exclaimed:  “All right! the trunk is none o’ mine!” To which the Boston girl:  “Well, whose trunk was it?” We agreed, nem. con., that this was indeed Anglis ipsis Anglior.

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English and American humour must be understood as referring to the average man in each case—­the “Man on the Cars,” as our cousins have it.  It would be a very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the land of Charles Lamb.  In the matter of comic papers it may also be doubted, even by those who most appreciate