be
doubted, even by those who most appreciate American humour, whether
England has altogether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the
States to speak of "poor old _Punch_," and to affect astonishment at
seeing in its "senile pages" anything that they have to admit to be
funny. Doubtless a great deal of very laborious and vapid jesting goes
on in the pages of the _doyen_ of English comic weeklies; but at its
best _Punch_ is hard to beat, and its humours have often a literary
quality such as is seldom met with in an American journal of the same
kind. No American paper can even remotely claim to have added so much
to the gaiety of nations as the pages that can number names like Leech
and Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold and Tom Hood, Burnand and Charles
Keene, Du Maurier and Tenniel, Linley Sambourne and the author of
"Vice Versa," among its contributors past and present. And
besides--and the claim is a proud one--_Punch_ still remains the only
comic paper of importance that is always a perfect gentleman--a
gentleman who knows how to behave both in the smoking-room and the
drawing-room, who knows when a jest oversteps the boundary line of
coarseness, who realises that a laugh can sometimes be too dearly won.
_Punch_ is certainly a comic journal of which the English have every
reason to be proud; but if we had to name the paper most typical of
the English taste in humour we should, perhaps, be shamefacedly
compelled to turn to _Ally Sloper_.

The best American comic paper is _Life_, which is modelled on the
lines of the _Muenchener Fliegende Blaetter_, perhaps the funniest and
most mirth-provoking of all professedly humorous weeklies. Among the
most attractive features are the graceful and dignified drawings of
Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, who has in its pages done for American
society what Mr. Du Maurier has done for England by his scenes in
_Punch_; the sketches of F.G. Attwood and S.W. Van Schaick; and the
clever verses of M.E.W. The dryness, the smart exaggeration, the
point, the unexpectedness of American humour are all often admirably
represented in its pages; and the faults and foibles of contemporary
society are touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in
pencil and pen work. _Life_, like _Punch_, has also its more serious
side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns
our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes,
its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, an