burial and dressed up very fine in his best suit," etc. Now for me that
beginning is enough. To me that is not a story, but a tragedy. I am
so sorry for Mrs. MacDonald that I can't think of anything else. But I
think the explanation is that the Scotch are essentially such a devout
people and live so closely within the shadow of death itself that they
may without irreverence or pain jest where our lips would falter. Or
else, perhaps they don't care a cuss whether Sandy MacDonald died or
not. Take it either way.

But I am tired of talking of our faults. Let me turn to the more
pleasing task of discussing those of the English. In the first place,
and as a minor matter of form, I think that English humour suffers from
the tolerance afforded to the pun. For some reason English people find
puns funny. We don't. Here and there, no doubt, a pun may be made that
for some exceptional reason becomes a matter of genuine wit. But the
great mass of the English puns that disfigure the Press every week are
mere pointless verbalisms that to the American mind cause nothing but
weariness.

But even worse than the use of puns is the peculiar pedantry, not to say
priggishness, that haunts the English expression of humour. To make a
mistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a wrong ending to a Latin
word is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, it
might be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I imagine that
if an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin that any of our
classical scholars can command would be about equivalent to the French
of a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer. Yet one finds even the
immortal Punch citing recently as a very funny thing a newspaper
misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi et orbos," or the
other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point in
it that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't funny. Neither is it
funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, says Archimeeds; why
shouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English scale of values in these
things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pronounce Chicago properly
and they think nothing of that. But if a person mispronounces the
name of a Greek village of what O. Henry called "The Year B.C." it is
supposed to be excruciatingly funny.

I think in reality that this is only a part of the overdone scholarship
that haunts so much of English writing--not the best of it, but a lot of
it. It