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Updated: June 18, 2025
She is the home of humourists and no humour. A thousand jesters minister to her amusement, and she pays them handsomely. More jokes are made within her borders in a day than suffice the rest of the globe for a year. And the laughter which they provoke is not spontaneous. You can hear the creak of the machine as it goes to work.
But it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourists to anticipate this pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his own day; to look upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of its mere external habit.
The moment the butler opened the door, and the heavy hulk rolled into dock, Gibbie darted off as if he had been the wicked one tormenting the righteous, and in danger of being caught by a pair of holy tongs. Whether the tale was true or not, I do not know: with after-dinner humourists there is reason for caution.
He did not view the stir of the great Babel as a man with a wholesome mind should do; and thus from his infirmities we draw a moral. The moral is not the worse, in that it opposes the trite moralities of those who would take from action its motive: the men of genius, who are not also men of ambition, are either humourists, or visionaries, or hypochondriacs.
The drill-sergeant was regarded as the most entertaining of humourists, and decent men who had never done more than the normal and healthy amount of swearing, began to believe that it was impossible to be manly unless one bloodied every time one spoke: and swearing, which is a good and wholesome and manly and picturesque thing, suddenly became like the gibbering of an idiot.... One was led to believe that the drill-sergeant spent his time in ordering men to "bloody well form bloody fours!"
We gave some tobacco I think, and received a cat, two pounds of fresh butter, a Cumberland ham, WESTWARD HO! and Thackeray's ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. I was astonished at receiving two such fair books from the captain of a little coasting screw. Our honest, fat, old captain says this very grimly in his thick, broad voice.
Thackeray, later on, expresses affectionate gratitude for his presence at the "Lectures on English Humourists": "it goes to a man's heart to find amongst his friends such men as Kinglake and Venables, Higgins, Rawlinson, Carlyle, Ashburton and Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Wilberforce, looking on kindly." He dines out in all directions, himself giving dinners at Long's Hotel.
Though it was pointed out to them by the astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole truth concerning the past of the two men. They realised that Fergus and Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade. Their primitive sense of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious man.
Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement. Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists.
And he represented America as little as he echoed the voice of the people. Nor is it in the works of the humourists that we shall catch a glimpse of the national character. They, too, cast no shadow but their own. They attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration reveals the poverty of their wit.
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