The reason for this lies, I think, in the well-known fact that the Scotch are a truly educated people, not educated in the mere sense of having been made to go to school, but in the higher sense of having acquired an interest in books and a respect for learning. In England the higher classes alone possess this, the working class as a whole know nothing of it. But in Scotland the attitude is universal. And the more I reflect upon the subject, the more I believe that what counts most in the appreciation of humour is not nationality, but the degree of education enjoyed by the individual concerned. I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educated appreciation of humour is there—away down. Generally, if one attempts to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneath him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointless story from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his guard and has no jealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring with laughter and wiping his spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him converted as by magic into the merry, clever little school-boy that he was thirty years ago, before his education ossified him.

   But with the illiterate and the rustic no such process is possible. His sense of humour may be there as a sense, but the mechanism for setting it in operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the broadest and most elementary forms of joke can reach him. The magnificent mechanism of the art of words is, quite literally, a sealed book to him. Here and there, indeed, a form of fun is found so elementary in its nature and yet so excellent in execution that it appeals to all alike, to the illiterate and to the highbrow, to the peasant and the professor. Such, for example, are the antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or the depiction of Mr. Jiggs by the pencil of George McManus. But such cases are rare. As a rule the cheap fun that excites the rustic to laughter is execrable to the man of education.

   In the light of what I have said before it follows that the individuals that are findable in every English or American audience are much the same. All those who lecture or act are 

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