the
introduction of knowledge." I wonder whether he knew of that other good
saying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his own
person, a proof of the necessity of the Norman Conquest. He had, at all
events, a just and high estimate of the merits of my brilliant
colleague. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui
meminisse!" But Roosevelt was not himself a humorist, and his writings
give little evidence of his possession of the faculty. Lincoln, now, was
one of the foremost American humorists. But Roosevelt was too strenuous
for the practice of humor, which implies a certain relaxation of mind: a
detachment from the object of immediate pursuit: a superiority to
practical interests which indulges itself in the play of thought; and,
in the peculiarly American form of it, a humility which inclines one to
laugh at himself. Impossible to fancy T. R. making the answer that
Lincoln made to an applicant for office: "I haven't much influence with
this administration." As for that variety of humor that is called irony,
it demands a duplicity which the straight-out-speaking Roosevelt could
not practise. He was like Epaminondas in the Latin prose composition
book, who was such a lover of truth that he never told a falsehood even
in jest--_ne joco quidem_.

The only instance of his irony that I recall--there may be others--is
the one recorded by Mr. Leupp in his reply to Senator Gorman, who had
charged that the examiners of the Civil Service Commission had turned
down "a bright young man" in the city of Baltimore, an applicant for the
position of letter-carrier, "because he could not tell the most direct
route from Baltimore to Japan." Hereupon the young Civil Service
Commissioner challenged the senator to verify his statement, but Mr.
Gorman preserved a dignified silence. Then the Commissioner overwhelmed
him in a public letter from which Mr. Leupp quotes the closing passage,
beginning thus: "High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman! Clinging, trustful
Mr. Gorman! Nothing could shake his belief in that 'bright young man.'
Apparently he did not even yet try to find out his name--if he had a
name," and so on for nearly a page. Excellent fooling, but a bit too
long and heavy-handed for the truest ironic effect.

Many of our Presidents, however little given to the use of the pen, have
been successful coiners of phrases--phrases that have stuck: "entangling
alliances," "era of good feeling," "innocuous desuetude,"