III.—Humorous Books.

One of the greatest things to be desired in the books which you take off to the seaside with you is something to make you laugh. If you cannot be made to laugh, it is a case, not for the seaside, but for the surgical ward of a hospital or some other place where the human apparatus can be subjected to searching and drastic repairs. "Laughter holding both his sides" is the best of all physicians. A merry heart doeth good like a medicine; and a good book which tickles the midriff and makes you laugh till you cry does more to recuperate the worn-out nervous system than any specific that page 332 has ever been devised in the pharmacopoeia the druggist. It is possible that you may not be able to laugh right out, if you read your funny book all to yourself alone. The best prescription for extracting the maximum amount of merriment out of a book is to read it aloud to a sympathetic circle of people, young by preference, who can see a joke and are not ashamed to greet it when it comes with a giggle for a little joke and a hearty guffaw for a champion. If you have never tried this prescription, put it in practice this holiday, and you will regard me as your benefactor for life. To read an amusing book to a small, good-humoured crowd is like mercy—it is twice blessed: it blesses him who reads and those who are read to, and is a Striking manifestation of the scriptural saying about scattering and yet increasing, while he that withholdeth more than is meet tendeth to poverty. There are some supercilious people so fastidious they will not laugh at any but a superfine joke, and there are others so shameless that they refuse to smile at any joke except on first making its acquaintance. Now a good joke is like a good wife-one of the best gifts vouchsafed to mortals; and only to laugh once at a joke is as absurd as only to kiss your wife on your wedding day, and never again.

There are several authors whom critics of the blue china school have never deigned to recognise, who nevertheless distribute more health and happiness among the crowd of holiday makers than all the cynics in Christendom or the borders thereof. I can remember when Mark Twain was tabooed as vulgar; and as for Max Adeler—"Who is the creature?"—they never heard his name. The American humourist has won recognition of late years; but it is still a more or less temerarious exploit to venture to praise a comical book merely because it has made you and your children laugh till their sides were sore.

There, for instance, is Mr. W. L. Alden, whose delightful tales, "Told by the Colonel" (McClure, 3s. 6d.), have contributed much to the gaiety of the nations which speak English. It is about time the genial humourist brought out a new selection, and included in it the inimitable story of how the saloon-keeper out West got the better of the praying sisterhood. I have searched for that story in vain. Even my indexer cannot find it, and when my indexer cannot find anything, I generally conclude that it has followed Prospero's magic book into depths deeper than any plummet sounded. The wily but wicked barkeeper welcomed his pious visitants who came to hold a prayer-meeting in his saloon, then locked the door, and when the prayer meeting was in full blast, he let loose a friendly, timid, and innocent mouse! Imagine the scene of consternation! the pious sisters climbed on to the top of the tallest stools and screamed. But their relentless host, with relays of rats at his disposal, refused to release them until they had all partaken of his liquor, and appended their signatures to a certificate that as his Old Rye was the best they had ever tasted, they had every confidence is recommending it to their friends. It is a broad, screaming farce if you like, but it is unspeakably funny, and the man is indeed fit for nothing but stratagems, and spoils, and all manner of political scoundrelism who does not feel irresistibly impelled to laugh at Mr. Alden's story.

Mr. Alden, although living for the most part in England—when he is not in Italy—is an American. In Yorkshire there resides a native humourist, English born and English bred, whose books are rapidly acquiring somewhat of the popularity which they deserve. His name is W. Carter Platts, he is angling editor of the "Yorkshire Post," and to his books I owe many a hearty peal of laughter. There are few writers who move their readers more irresistibly to merriment. To have a house full of young folks on a holiday without a volume of W., Carter Platts' to read aloud on a wet day, or when they are resting after lunch, is not to live up to your privileges. I began on "Tuttlebury Tales" (Jerrold, 2s. 6d.), and read it through aloud to my seaside party, and found each chapter was accompanied by those outbursts of laughter which are as, spontaneous as they are contagious. My sister carried off the book, and found it equally mirth-provoking when read to the inmates of a workhouse—who art; not much predisposed to gaiety.

Mr. W. Carter Platts is broadly farcical and exquisitely humorous. If sometimes there is a certain mannerism in his style, and a certain sameness in which he leads up to his effects, that is no more than can be said of much more famous personages in all departments of literature and art. I have never seen "Charley's Aunt," but from what I have heard of the way in which that play affects those who hear it, I should imagine Mr. Platts' writing is something like "Charley's Aunt" in print. The "Spectator" compares him to Max Adeler, and he is quite as amusing. No doubt much of the humour is simple, some of it even vulgar, and it is as exaggerated in its way as Mr. Shell's "Yellow Danger." But it is full of exuberant good spirits, good humour, and good jokes.

After "Tuttlebury Tales" we had his "Angling Done Here" (Jerrold, 1s.)—more or less impossible yarns strung loosely on the line of a more or less mythical angler. And now we have, just in time for the holidays, his latest shilling contribution to the mirth of mankind—"A Few Smiles" (Jerrold, 1s.) It will raise a few smiles—not a few, I hope, although perhaps not so many as "Tuttlebury Tales." the breadth of the author's smile, he says in his preface, will depend on the width of the book's circulation, and that, in turn, will depend upon how far it succeeds in spreading a few smiles over the countenance of the reader:— page 333

If any reader should find the title misleading, and that there is nothing whatever in these pages gay and joyous and calculated to make home happy, the author (being a conscientious man with a sincere dread of appearing before the public under false pretences) will be humbly grateful to him if he will buy up and destroy all the copies he can lay his hands on.

The story of the man who ruptured his nerve centres, and connected up the wrong way, so that every nerve was switched on to the wrong receiver, is as good as Max Adeler, and many of his monstrous fibs are equal in their capacious unveracity to the greatest of the American variety of news paper fable.

Mr. Platts is consciously humorous, deliberately and malice prepense farcical. It is far otherwise with the little unconscious humourists whose essays Mr. H. J. Barker has just reissued in a fourth edition under the title, "The Comic Side of School Life" (Jerrold, 6d.) "Very Original English" was the original title of the collection, portions of which appeared in "Longman's Magazine." It has been going about doing good and making people laugh at the delightfully humorous touches of the juvenile authors until it has now reached a circulation of 17,000. I have noticed it before, but I must welcome it again, and, for the sake of readers who may not have seen the previous notice, I make free to sample Mr. Barker's contribution to our holiday mirth by extracting a few passages from the papers written by his scholars on subjects in Natural History. They speak for themselves, and need neither introduction nor comment:—