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débris of which they have filled up the Valley of Humiliation; and instead of meeting pilgrims and compelling them to mortal combat, Apollyon is the engine-driver. The passage is safe, the journey is short, but somehow, when the end is near the doubts thicken, and the smile of the humourist is of a kind to awaken grave troubled thoughts.

6

Hitherto slavery and politics have been the chief subjects of the best American humour. The great social satirist has to come. And should he arise there will be ample scope for the play of his saturnine humour. 'The leading defect of the Yankee,' says an American writer, E. P. Whipple, consists in the gulf which separates his moral opinions from his moral principles. His talk about virtue in the abstract would pass as sound in a nation of saints, but he still contrives that his interests shall not suffer by the rigidity of his maxims. Your true Yankee, indeed, has a spruce, clean, Pecksniffian way of doing a wrong, which is inimitable. Believing, after a certain fashion, in justice and retribution, he still thinks that a sly, shrewd, keen, supple gentleman, like himself, can dodge in a quiet way the moral laws of the universe, without any particular pother being made about it.' This affords a fine opening for the great humourist with genuine. insight and a sure touch; a nature that can 'coin the heart for jests,' use the scalpel smilingly, apply the caustic genially, and give the bitter drink blandly. Would the Americans welcome such a writer? There was a time. when they would not: we think there are signs that they now would. They are beginning to laugh, and to laugh at their own expense. This is finding out the true remedy for that over-sensitiveness at the laugh of others which has tyrannized over them so long.

The author of the Potiphar Papers' has attempted to satirize the vices and foibles of the upper ten thousand,' the ruinous extravagance and vulgar display, the insane ambition to blow the loudest trumpet and beat the biggest drum, the crushing and trampling to get a front seat in the universe of fashion, i.e. a palatial residence with thirty feet of frontage; the coarse worship of wealth, the pompous profusion, and the vain endeavours of a shoddy aristocracy to outshine all foreign splendours; the houses which are like a woman dressed in Ninon de l'Enclos' bodice, with Queen Anne's hooped skirt, who limps in Chinese shoes, and wears an Elizabethan ruff round her neck and a Druse's horn on her head;' the vast mirrors that only serve to magnify the carnival of incongruity; the want of taste everywhere, or rather the prevalence of the taste that estimates all things as beautiful and precious which cost a great deal of money. One of the best characters in these papers is Thurz Pasha,' ambas

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sador from the King of Sennaar.' He writes home to his royal master the results of his experience. I have found them (the Americans) totally free from the petty ambitions, the bitter resolves, and the hollow pretences, that characterize the society of older States. The people of the first fashion unite the greatest simplicity of character with the utmost variety of intelligence, and the most graceful elegance of manner.

The universal courtesy and consideration--the gentle charity, which does not consider the appearance but the substance--the republican independence, which teaches foreign lords and ladies the worthlessness of mere rank, by obviously respecting the character and not the title-the eagerness with which foreign habits are subdued, by the positive nature of American manners-the readiness to assist-the total want of coarse social emulation-the absence of ignorance, prejudice, and vulgarity in the selecter circles-the broad, sweet, catholic welcome to all that is essentially national and characteristic, which sends the young American abroad only that he may return eschewing European habits, and with a confidence in man and his country chastened by experience-these have most interested and charmed me in the observation of this pleasing people. They are never ashamed to confess that they are poor. They acknowledge the equal dignity of all kinds of labour, and do not presume on any social difference between their baker and themselves. Knowing that luxury enervates a nation, they aim to show in their lives, as in their persons, that simplicity is the finest ornament. We, who are reputed savages, might well be astonished and fascinated with the results of civilization, as they are here displayed.'

Oliver Wendell Holmes is likewise doing his best to tell his countrymen a few truths it was well they should learn, especially from their own writers. He can say the most unpalatable things in the pleasantest possible way. He does not appeal to the pride and pugnacity of his countrymen, or tell them that America is the only place in which a man can stand upright and draw free breath. He thinks there is no sufficient flavour of humanity in the soil' out of which they grow, and that it makes a man humane to live on the old humanized soil' of Europe. He will not deny the past for the sake of glorifying the present. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings if laid on them; nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism.' He is equally the enemy of 'high-falutin,' and spread-eagleism, and social slang. First-rate,' 'prime,' 'a prime article,' 'a superior piece of goods,' 'a gent in a flowered vest;' all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. He tells them that 'good breeding is surface Christianity.' He slyly consoles them with the thought that good Americans

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when they die go to Paris.' He is thoroughly national himself, and would have American patriotism large and liberal, not a narrow provincial conceit. The 'autocrat' is assuredly one of the pleasantest specimens of the American gentleman, and one of the most charming of all chatty companions; genial, witty, and wise; never wearisome. We fancy the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table' is not so well known or widely read in this country as it deserves to be. A more delightful book has not come over the Atlantic.

We have reserved Holmes to the last, not that he is least amongst American humourists, but because he brings American humour to its finest point, and is, in fact, the first of American Wits.

Perhaps the following verses will best illustrate a speciality of Holmes's wit, the kind of badinage with which he quizzes common sense so successfully, by his happy paradox of serious straightforward statement, and quiet qualifying afterwards by which he tapers his point.

CONTENTMENT.

" 'Man wants but little here below.'

'Little I ask; my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone
(A very plain brown stone will do),
That I may call my own ;-
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun..
Plain food is quite enough for me;

Three courses are as good as ten;
If Nature can subsist on three,

Thank Heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice,-
My choice would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land;-
Give me a mortgage here and there,
Some good bank-stock, some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share,-

I only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.

Honours are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names;
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo-

But only near St. James;
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin

To care for such unfruitful things ;--
One good-sized diamond in a pin,

Some, not so large, in rings,
A ruby, and a pearl, or so,

Will do for me;-I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire
(Good, heavy silks are never dear);
I own perhaps I might desire

Some shawls of true Cashmere,-
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.
Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But all must be of buhl?

Give grasping pomp its double care,-
I ask but one recumbent chair.
Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch;
If heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them much,-
Too grateful for the blessing lent

Of simple tastes and mind content!'

Having had our laugh at Yankee humour, let us glance at what it tells us seriously. In the first place it is morally healthy and sound. It has its coarsenesses, though these lie more in the using of a word profanely than in profanity of purpose. It has no ribaldry of Silenus, nor is there any leer of the satyr from among the leaves. We perceive no tendency to uncleanness. Fashionable ladies of the New York 'upper ten thousand' may be French at heart in the matter of dress and novel-reading, but the national humour does not follow the French fashion; has no dalliance with the devil by playing with forbidden things, no art of insidious suggestion. In this respect it is hale and honest as nature herself. And it is just as sound on the subject of politics. Disgust more profound, scorn more scathing, than Lowell expresses for the scum of the national intellect thrown up to the political surface by the tumult and fierce whirl of the national life, could not be uttered in English. He tells the people they cannot make any great advance; cannot ascend the heights of a noble humanity; cannot reach the promise of their new land and new life; cannot win respect for self nor applause from others.

'Long 'z you elect for Congressmen poor shotes thet want to go Coz they can't seem to git their grub no otherways than so,

An'

An' let your bes' men stay to home coz they wun't show ez talkers,
Nor can't be hired to fool ye an' sof'-soap ye at a caucus,-
Long 'z ye set by Rotashun more 'n ye do by folks's merits,

Ez though experunce thriv by change o' sile, like corn an' kerrits,— Long 'z you allow a critter's "claims" coz, spite o' shoves an' tippins,

He's kep' his private pan jest where 't would ketch mos' public drippins

Long 'z you suppose your votes can turn biled kebbage into brain,
An' ary man thet 's pop'lar 's fit to drive a lightnin'-train,
Long 'z you believe democracy means I'm ez good ez you be,
An' thet a feller from the ranks can't be a knave or booby,—
Long 'z Congress seems purvided, like yer street cars an' yer
'busses,

With ollers room for jes' one more o' your spiled-in-bakin' cusses,
Dough 'thout the emptins of a soul, an' yit with means about 'em
(Like essence-peddlers*) thet 'll make folks long to be without 'em,
Jest heavy 'nough to turn a scale thet 's doubtfle the wrong way,
An' make their nat'ral arsenal o' bein' nasty pay.'

The war has taught the Americans many lessons, but it was only driving home, and clenching in some places, what their writers had been telling them beforehand. For example, that it is man, manhood, not multitude, which leads the nations and makes them great. They were made to learn, through a long and painful struggle, the helplessness of hands without head. But this was what their best instructors had already insisted on. And, in the midst of the fight, Lowell cries to his country

men,

'It ain't your twenty millions that'll ever block Jeff's game,
But one man thet wun't let 'em jog jest ez he's takin' aim.'

And again, in answer to the continual call for more men, he says,

'More men? More Man! It's there we fail;

Weak plans grow weaker yit by lengthenin':

Wut use in addin' to the tail,

When it's the head 's in need of strengthenin'?

We wanted one thet felt all Chief,

From roots o' hair to sole o' stockin',

Square-sot with thousan'-ton belief

In him an' us, ef earth went rockin'!'

We have always believed that there were better things at the centre of American life than were made conspicuous on the surface. We knew there were Americans who had not the popular belief in buncombe,' who had the deepest con

Euphuistic for 'bugs.'

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