In these days dialect proper, having gained the prestige of comparative rarity, like a peasant’s national costume, or a bit of _bric-à-brac_, has been favoured by the humorist, although its reproduction in our literature has well-nigh insurmountable difficulties to cope with. The Low German, one of the most interesting of German dialects, because, historically, the most intact, and the most incapable of amalgamation with the language that has superseded it, had been left to grow rusty so far as literature was concerned, until Fritz Reuter rescued it from threatening oblivion, and made it the vehicle of a naïve and spontaneous _genre_ of humour, to which it lent itself with singular charm and appropriateness. The cause of the former neglect of Low German as a means of literary expression was very obvious, and there was no gainsaying the justice of it--viz., that it is used to-day only by the lower classes of Northern Germany, and that among readers there is but a very limited number to whom it is more comprehensible than a foreign language would be. It is this fact also which explains why Fritz Reuter, the most intimate and sympathetic of German humorists, although extensively read, has never attained the widest popularity. Fundamentally, the German character appears to be averse to humour. Its mirth does not come to it spontaneously, a gift of the gods, arising out of the mere exuberance of being. This nation shares the temperament of all northern races, it moves more to the minor strains of feeling, to the _Adagio_ which Richard Wagner found so aptly expressive of its character. It is quick to respond to things mystic, and yearns over the vague grace of twilight moods. It worships at the shrine of the hapless Prince of Denmark.--I say fundamentally, for, looking at the life of the nation as it appears to-day, in those pleasures of the lower and middle classes which have their scene of action in the out-of-door world, there would appear to be in plenty a spirit of merry-making and pleasure-seeking inherent in the German character. The mere primitive love of a good time, however, is inseparably connected with those classes representing, in a manner, a child-like stage of intellectual development the world over, and is not characteristic in any special sense of the German people. It is safe to admit that a certain lightness of disposition, which seems indispensable to the humorous attitude, is absent among those race-qualities which go to make up the German nature pure and simple. If the nation has developed within itself those germs which have blossomed into a sense of the humorous; if it has passed through all those early stages of perception and expression which have culminated in a humorous literature of sturdy strength; if it has found at length a humorous literature (with Gottfried Keller for its prophet, and F. T. Vischer for its critic and exponent), it is due probably to a complexity of influences somewhat difficult to determine.