The gentlemen named are the then President, Mr. Harrison; the Vice-President, Mr. Morton, who was owner or part owner of one of the large Washington hotels; and Mr. Wanamaker, Postmaster General, well known as “an earnest Christian worker.”

I have seen even the sacred Declaration of Independence imitated, both in wording and in external form, as the advertisement of a hotel.

A story current in Philadelphia refers to Mr. Richard Vaux, an eminent citizen and member of a highly respected old Quaker family, who in his youth had been an attache of the American Legation in London.  One of his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that he had danced with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball and had found her a very charming partner.  His mother replied:  “It pleaseth me much, Richard, to hear of thy success at the ball in Buckingham Palace; but thee must remember it would be a great blow to thy father to have thee marry out of meeting.”

Philosophy, art, and letters receive no greater deference at the hands of the American humorist.  Even an Oliver Wendell Holmes will say of metaphysics that it is like “splitting a log; when you have done, you have two more to split.”  A poster long used by the comedians Crane and Robson represented these popular favourites in the guise of the two lowermost cherubs in the Sistine Madonna.  Bill Nye’s assertion that “the peculiarity of classical music is that it is so much better than it sounds” is typical of a whole battalion of quips.  Scenery, even when associated with poetry, fares no better.  The advertising fiend who defaces the most picturesque rocks with his atrocious announcements is, perhaps, hardly entitled to the name of humorist; but the man who affixed the name of Minniegiggle to a small fall near the famous Minnehaha evidently thought himself one.  So, doubtless, did one of my predecessors in a dressing-cabin at Niagara, who had inscribed on its walls: 

    “Cannon to right of them,
    Cannon to left of them,
    Cannon in front of them,
    Volleyed and thundered! 
    But the man who desc_i_nds
    Through the Cave of the Winds
    Can give points to the noble six hundred.”

Of the extravagant exaggeration of American humour it is hardly necessary to give examples.  This, to the ordinary observer, has perhaps been always its salient feature; and stock examples will occur to everyone.  It is easy to see how readily this form of humour can be abused, and as a matter of fact it is abused daily and hourly.  Many would-be American humorists fail entirely to see that exaggeration alone is not necessarily funny.

To illustrate:  the story of the woman who described the suddenness of the American cyclone by saying that, as she looked up from her gardening, “she saw the air black with her intimate friends,” seems to me a thoroughly humorous application of the exaggeration principle.  So, too, is the description of a man so terribly thin that he never could tell whether he had the stomach-ache or the lumbago.  But the jester who expects you to laugh at the tale of the fish that was so large that the water of the lake subsided two feet when it was drawn ashore simply does not know where humour ends and drivelling idiocy begins.