d its eloquent
tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other
hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which
considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it
sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which
no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard--for a
British critic at any rate--to see any perennial interest in the long
series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the
gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare
_motifs_ are constantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And
occasionally--very occasionally--there is a touch of coarseness in the
drawings of _Life_ which suggests the worst features of its German
prototype rather than anything it has borrowed from England.

Among the political comic journals of America mention may be made of
_Puck_, the rough and gaudy cartoons of which have often what the
Germans would call a _packende Derbheit_ of their own that is by no
means ineffective. Of the other American--as, indeed, of the other
British--comic papers I prefer to say nothing, except that I have
often seen them in houses and in hands to which they seemed but ill
adapted.

Among the characteristics of American humour--the humour of the
average man, the average newspaper, the average play--are its utter
irreverence, its droll extravagance, its dry suggestiveness, its
_naivete_ (real or apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its
fondness for antithesis and anti-climax. Mark Twain may stand as the
high priest of irreverence in American humour, as witnessed in his
"Innocents Abroad" and his "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." In
this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly
escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery. It has
no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond. An
undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words: "You
kick the bucket; we do the rest." A paper will head an account of the
hanging of three mulattoes with "Three Chocolate Drops." It has no
reverence for the names and phrases associated with our deepest
religious feelings. Buckeye's patent filter is advertised as
thoroughly reliable--"being what it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be." Mr. Boyesen tells of meeting a venerable clergyman,
whose longevity, according to his introducer, was due to the fact that
"he was waiting for