The dry suggestiveness of American humour is also a well-known feature.  In its crudest phase it assumes such forms as the following:  “Mrs. William Hankins lighted her fire with coal oil on February 23.  Her clothes fit the present Mrs. Hankins to a T.”  The ordinary Englishman will see the point of a jest like this (though his mind will not fly to it with the electric rapidity of the American’s), but the more delicate forms of this allusive style of wit will often escape him altogether.  Or, if he now begins to “jump” with an almost American agility it is because the cleverest witticisms of the Detroit Free Press are now constantly served up to him in the comic columns of his evening paper.  We have got the length of being consumers if not producers of this style of jest.

In its higher developments this quality of humour melts imperceptibly into irony.  This has been cultivated by the Americans with great success—­perhaps never better than in the columns of that admirable weekly journal the Nation.  Anyone who cares to search the files of about eight or ten years back will find a number of ironical leaders, which by their subtlety and wit delighted those who “caught on,” while, on the other hand, they often deceived even the elect Americans themselves and provoked a shower of innocently approving or depreciatory letters.

Apart altogether from the specific difference between American and English humour we cannot help noticing how humour penetrates and gives savour to the whole of American life.  There is almost no business too important to be smoothed over with a jest; and serio-comic allusions may crop up amongst the most barren-looking reefs of scrip and bargaining.  It is almost impossible to imagine a governor of the Bank of England making a joke in his official capacity, but wit is perfected in the mouth of similar sucklings in New York.  Of recent prominent speakers in America all except Carl Schurz and George William Curtis are professed humorists.

When Professor Boyesen, at an examination in Columbia College, set as one of the questions, “Write an account of your life,” he found that seventeen out of thirty-two responses were in a jocular vein.  Fifteen of the seventeen students bore names that indicated American parentage, while all but three of the non-jokers had foreign names.  Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the great example of this tendency to introduce the element of humour into the graver concerns of life; and his biography narrates many instances of its most happy effect. All the newspapers, including the religious weeklies, have a comic column.