Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/146

 its style of describing a drinking scene, and the shipwreck of the company by drink. The topers suddenly conceive that the room is a vessel laboring at sea: one climbs the bed-post and reports turbulent weather, whereat all go to work to lighten the vessel by throwing the furniture into the street. One man gets into the bass-viol for a cock-boat. When the constable enters he is taken for Neptune, and his posse for Tritons. In short, the American gift for exaggeration was started under an Elizabethan sun.

Sometimes the breadth of imagination produces the effect of wit by bringing two incongruous ideas under one statement. During a political procession, a remarkably dirty man, stopping in front of a small boy who was sitting on a fence, expected to have some fun with him. "Well, boy, how much do you weigh?" "As much as you would if you were washed." Such a free-soiler as that can be matched with nothing short of a line of Shakspeare:

"Lord of thy presence, and no land beside."

The American would be quite capable of composing narratives in the Eastern vein, as in that series of fables called the Hitopadesa, which attributed to animals the passions and motives of men. The famous mediæval poem of "Reynard the Fox" presumes the same intelligence. Here is a specimen, whose slight flavor of coarseness is lost and forgotten in the genius of its climax. Just as a traveller was writing his name on the register of a Leavenworth hotel, a certain insect took its