hegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with
the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he
had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer
whimsical incongruity, like this:--

"There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully
prepared, and that iz twins."

But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that
is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyere or La Rochefoucauld.
Take this:--

"Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who
wants tew be ruined."

Or this:--

"When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry
thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers
of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks!

Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French
moralists:--

"It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering
him in his own estimashun, and yures too."

See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire.
It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads,"
Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve
in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off
without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He
had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a
nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes
dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and
more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, and
givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint
worth a soo markee."

The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American
history.

That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a
species of American humor which has been of immense historical
importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the
humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this
falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes
the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who
fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place,
in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in
which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population,
the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented o