The fact is that America and England alike have been dosed to death with the lucubrations of handy scribblers who caught something of Mark Twain’s trick and pretended to something of his gift, and the label “American humourist” nowadays repels with an even greater insistence than it formerly attracted. Mr. Twain made desperate and valiant efforts to retrieve his waning popularity with a book called “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.” If ever there was a piece of writing nicely calculated to tickle and make purr the fat-necked American here was the article. But it fizzled in the pan, failed in short to bring ’em on again. And it now belongs to the category of books that people have forgotten. So much for Mr. Twain, whom I admire, but of whom, nevertheless, I have taken leave to speak the truth. Artemus Ward and Josh Billings are dead, and their souls, I trust, are with the saints; so that they will pardon me when I venture on the opinion that the humour they gave us was of the thinnest sort, and, taking into account the furore it created, extraordinarily ephemeral. However any person of sense came to accept the following for humour passes my comprehension:— EXPERIENCES AS AN EDITOR “In the Ortum of 18— my friend, the editor of the Baldissville Bugle, was obleged to leave perfeshernal dooties & go & dig his taters, & he axed me to edit for him doorin his absence. Accordinly I ground up his Shears and commenced. It didn’t take me a grate while to slash out copy enuff from the xchanges for one issoo, and I thawt I’d ride up to the next town on a little Jaunt, to rest my Branes which had bin severely rackt by my mental efforts (This is sorter Ironical) So I went over to the Rale Rood offiss and axed the Sooprintendent for a pars. ‘You a editer,’ he axed, evinebtly on the point of snickerin. ‘Yes, Sir,’ sez I, ‘Don’t I look poor enuff?’ ‘Just about,’ sed he, ‘but our Road can’t pars you.’ ‘Can’t hay.’ ‘No Sir—it can’t.’ ‘Becauz,’ sez I, looking him full in the face with a Eagle eye, ‘it goes so darned slow it can’t pars anybody!’ Methink I had him thar. It is the slowest Rale Road in the West. With a mortified air, he tole me to get out of his offiss. I pittid him and went.” The essence of this excursion into the realms of the Comic Spirit is about as cheap and small a thing in essences as one is likely to come across. Mr. Ward had made or heard somebody make a punning retort of an ultra-feeble quality, and straightway he rushes off to turn it into humourous lucubration. The Americans believed it was “darned funny,” it raised “gales of laughter” among them, and they shouted about its excellences till the English also began to recognise them. At best Artemus Ward is humour of the “Wot-the-orfis-boy-finks” order, and as such it has always been eschewed by persons blessed with a trifle more than the milk-maid order of intellect.