Perhaps this humour is a modern production, like certain fruits cultivated in Scotland “with deeficulty.” There were times, indeed, when life here was no laughing matter. But even the sun-loving vine is all the better for a touch of frost at its roots, and the best wines are not those the most easily made. In contrast with other home-brewed fun that soon goes flat, and with such cheap brands as “Joe Miller,” the vintage of Scottish humour, if not distinguished by effervescing spurts of fancy, has body and character which only improve by age, keeping well even when decanted, and giving a marked flavour when mixed with less potent materials, into _Punch_, let us say. There is also a dry quality thrown away on palates used to the public-house tap; Ally Sloper, for instance, might not taste the womanthropy, as he would call it, of that bachelor divine who began his discourse on the Ten Virgins with “What strikes us here, my brethren, is the unusually large proportion of _wise_ Virgins.” A good Scotch story, with the real smack upon the tongue, bears to be told again, like an aphorism distilled from the wisdom of generations. Sound humour is but the seamy side of common-sense, for a sense of the incongruous degenerates into nonsense if not shaped by a clear eye for the relation and proportion of things. If the reader will consider the many specimens of Scottish humour now current in England, or to be drawn from such treasuries as Dean Ramsay’s; and if he will reflect on their weight and minting, he may understand the value of this coinage in the national life.