There is considerable truth and point in calling Haliburton ‘the Apostle of American Humor.’ As to progenitorship, the fact is that Benjamin Franklin is the ‘father’ of indigenous American humor. In 1765 Franklin sent to a London newspaper what is the first example of that species of satiric burlesque, that preposterous or extravagant nonsense, said with a grave air of veracity, which is accepted as the characteristic matter and manner of American humor. Franklin was versatile in genius and so variously occupied in his long career that hardly can he be regarded as systematic in any calling. Yet he was as systematic as a humorist and satirist as he was in anything else. He began his literary career as a humorist when, in 1722, he contributed pseudonymously to _The New England Courant_ the series of imitative Addisonian skits known as the ‘Silence Dogood Papers.’ Seven years later, he continued his humor in _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ with the sprightly letters of ‘Busybody,’ ‘Anthony Afterwit,’ ‘Alice Addertongue,’ and ‘Bob Brief,’ and with satiric burlesques in _A Meditation on a Quart Mug_, _A Witch Trial at Mount Holly_, and other squibs. Quite systematic was the humor of Franklin’s Prefaces to _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ (1732-1758) and of some of the aphoristic wit and wisdom in the Almanacks when the epigrams or maxims were Franklin’s own invention, as, for instance, ‘Never take a wife till you have a house (and a fire) to put her in.’ Though most of the proverbial wisdom in _Poor Richard_ was borrowed, the form and wit—the ‘Yankee smartness’—of it were Franklin’s creation, and he became the ‘father’ of all those New World humorists who wrote aphoristic wit and wisdom, down to Haliburton and from Haliburton down to Westcott (‘David Harum’). Masterpieces in mordant satire worthy of Dean Swift are Franklin’s _Of the Meanes of disposing the Enemies of Peace_ (1760), _An Edict by the King of Prussia_ (1773), _Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One_ (1773), _Speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim_ (an ironical justification for the enslaving of the Christians by Mohammedan Africans, 1790). Also to be mentioned are Franklin’s _bagatelles_ (1778-80), written during his stay at Passy, France, of which the most famous are _The Ephemera_, _The Story of the Whistle_, _The Morals of Chess_, and _The Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_.