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Updated: October 18, 2025
Strange as it may seem to say this of the literary Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great humourists of the world; and from one, and that the most important, point of view the praise is not extravagant.
Three American professional humourists whom I had the good fortune to meet and be with for some time were Irvin Cobb, Don Marquis, and Oliver Herford, each authentic and each so different. Beneath Mr. Cobb's fun is a mass of ripe experience and sagacity. However playful he may be on the surface one is aware of an almost Johnsonian universality beneath.
Wherefore they were forever after called humourists and ruined. When they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and when they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.
But of all humourists of the professional class, I prefer the clergyman, especially if he is well stricken in years, and has been anchored all his life in a country charge. He is none of your loud wits. There is a lady-like delicacy in his mind, a constant sense of his holy office, which warn him off dangerous subjects. This reserve, however, does but improve the quality of his mirth.
We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his English Humourists; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day preacher and much more to that effect.
"Lupin has never let any consideration of danger prevent him doing anything that caught his fancy. He has odd fancies, too. He's a humourist of the most varied kind grim, ironic, farcical, as the mood takes him. He must be awfully trying to live with," said Guerchard. "Do you think humourists are trying to live with?" said the Duke, in a meditative tone.
It should be said, however, that stories are current in relation to similar jokes played by humourists upon other artists. Old Lawrence had been compelled to abandon the Black Bear, and had retreated to Bath with his family. 'Bath, we are informed, 'was at that time London devoid of its mixed society and vulgarity.
What was the use of stirring up a scandal which would only have led to jocular remarks in the newspapers? Whenever any fraudulent miracles of this kind were discovered, the Fathers contented themselves with forcing the guilty parties to go away. Moreover, these feigners were far from numerous, despite all that was related of them in the amusing stories concocted by Voltairean humourists.
Francis Wilson wrote some years ago a charming and enthusiastic paper for the "Century Magazine," he claimed that Mr. Field was so great a humourist as to be what all great humourists are, a moralist as well.
Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour. There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma.
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