that a sort of legend has grown around American humour. It is presumed to be a superior article and to enjoy the same kind of pre-eminence as French cooking, the Russian ballet, and Italian organ grinding. With this goes the converse supposition that the British people are inferior in humour, that a joke reaches them only with great difficulty, and that a British audience listens to humour in gloomy and unintelligent silence. People still love to repeat the famous story of how John Bright listened attentively to Artemus Ward's lecture in London and then said, gravely, that he "doubted many of the young man's statements"; and readers still remember Mark Twain's famous parody of the discussion of his book by a wooden-headed reviewer of an English review.

   But the legend in reality is only a legend. If the English are inferior to Americans in humour, I, for one, am at a loss to see where it comes in. If there is anything on our continent superior in humour to Punch I should like to see it. If we have any more humorous writers in our midst than E. V. Lucas and Charles Graves and Owen Seaman I should like to read what they write; and if there is any audience capable of more laughter and more generous appreciation than an audience in London, or Bristol, or Aberdeen, I should like to lecture to it.

   During my voyage of discovery in Great Britain I had very exceptional opportunities for testing the truth of these comparisons. It was my good fortune to appear as an avowed humourist in all the great British cities. I lectured as far north as Aberdeen and as far south as Brighton and Bournemouth; I travelled eastward to Ipswich and westward into Wales. I spoke on serious subjects, but with a joke or two in loco, at the universities, at business gatherings, and at London dinners; I watched, lost in admiration, the inspired merriment of the Savages of Adelphi Terrace, and in my moments of leisure I observed, with a scientific eye, the gaieties of the London revues. As a result of which I say with conviction that, speaking by and large, the two communities are on the same level. A Harvard audience, as I have reason gratefully to acknowledge, is wonderful. But an Oxford audience is just as good. A gathering of business men in a textile town in the Midlands is just as heavy as a gathering of business men in Decatur, Indiana, but no heavier; and an audience of English schoolboys as at Rugby or at Clifton is capable of a wild and sustained merriment not to be outdone from Halifax to Los Angeles.

   There is, however, one vital difference between American and English audiences which would be apt to discourage at the outset any 

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