e there no doubt in
plenty, and some men; but not a man whom any woman would have," is
strikingly French. The word of a New York broker, when Mr. Roosevelt
sailed for Africa, "Wall Street expects every lion to do its duty!"
equals in brevity and malice the keen-edged satire of Italy. No
sharper thrust was ever made at prince or potentate.

The truth is that our love of a jest knows no limit and respects no
law. The incongruities of an unequal civilization (we live in the
land of contrasts) have accustomed us to absurdities, and reconciled
us to ridicule. We rather like being satirized by our own countrymen.
We are very kind and a little cruel to our humourists. We crown them
with praise, we hold them to our hearts, we pay them any price they
ask for their wares; but we insist upon their being funny all the
time. Once a humourist, always a humourist, is our way of thinking;
and we resent even a saving lapse into seriousness on the part of
those who have had the good or the ill fortune to make us laugh.

England is equally obdurate in this regard. Her love of laughter has
been consecrated by Oxford,--Oxford, the dignified refuge of English
scholarship, which passed by a score of American scholars to bestow
her honours on our great American joker. And because of this love
of laughter, so desperate in a serious nation, English jesters have
enjoyed the uneasy privileges of a court fool. Look at poor Hood.
What he really loved was to wallow in the pathetic,--to write such
harrowing verses as the "Bridge of Sighs," and the "Song of the Shirt"
(which achieved the rare distinction of being printed--like the
"Beggar's Petition"--on cotton handkerchiefs), and the "Lady's
Dream." Every time he broke from his traces, he plunged into these
morasses of melancholy; but he was always pulled out again, and
reharnessed to his jokes. He would have liked to be funny
occasionally and spontaneously, and it was the will of his master,
the public, that he should be funny all the time, or starve. Lord
Chesterfield wisely said that a man should live within his wit as
well as within his income; but if Hood had lived within his wit--which
might then have possessed a vital and lasting quality--he would have
had no income. His role in life was like that of a dancing bear, which
is held to commit a solecism every time it settles wearily down on
the four legs nature gave it.

The same tyrannous demand hounded Mr. Eugene Field along his
joke-strewn