_Humour of the Colonial Period._--In the early periods of our history, conscious humour did not exist. The colonists were too intent upon subduing the wilderness and safeguarding their religion to spend time in making fun. Their steeple-crowned hats, their staid garb, and the severe simplicity of their speech and conduct may seem ridiculous to us now; but, depend upon it, these were very serious matters to the Puritans themselves. A sudden outbreak of frivolity, whether it showed in a departure from the accepted dress or in an unusual use of language, would have been looked upon as sufficient cause for an immediate ecclesiastical investigation and solemn condemnation. Surely a community that in all seriousness could pass a law making it a finable offence in a man to kiss his wife on Sunday, would have been horror-stricken at the irreverent flippancy of Eli Perkins and of George Ade, and would no doubt have called down anathema upon Bill Nye and possibly even upon Carolyn Wells. _Humour of the Revolutionary Period._--Nor did circumstances permit the rise of humour in the Revolutionary period. The great joke of that time was the struggle between the pigmy and the giant, ending in the discomfiture of the latter to the tune of “Yankee Doodle came to town.” A few grim remarks have come down to us, it must be admitted, remarks which amuse us now, but which could have been little provocative of laughter when they were uttered. Certainly we have no record of hilarious mirth filling the chamber when at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin sharply replied to the remark, “Well, in this matter I suppose we must all hang together,” with the words, “Yes, or we shall all hang separately!” Life indeed was far too serious in both the earlier periods of American history and literature to be made a source of amusement. True, we have not a little work, satiric in tone, from such writers as the patriot, John Trumbull (1750-1831), and the Tory, Jonathan Odell (1737-1881), of whom the first in his “M’Fingal” (1775-1782) imitated Butler’s “Hudibras,” and the second in his “Word of Congress” (1779) and “The American Times” (1780) followed models set up by Dryden, Pope, and Churchill. Joel Barlow (1754-1812), too, deserves passing mention here for his mock-heroic poem, “The Hasty Pudding” (1793); and Philip Freneau (1752-1832) must be named on account of several briefer pieces of verse intended, no doubt, to be funny, but succeeding only in being abusive and vituperative of British leaders and British methods. On the whole, the efforts of all these writers, so far as humour is concerned, were little better than clumsy; and nowadays, if we bother with their works at all, we laugh at the authors rather than with them.