The American Joe Miller. By Robert Kempt. (Adams and Francis).
—This little book possesses a great advantage over the general ran of collections of anecdotes or witticisms. In general, nothing can be more dreary or dispiriting than the perusal of only a few pages of unconnected "good" stories and jokes. But American humour is so totally different from that of any other nation, and so thoroughly characteristic in itself, that a collection of Yankee stories has a unity and special character which give it a fair raison d'être. Yankee humour—allowed by Sydney Smith to be absolutely unique—is the genuine growth of the distinctive features and civilization of Yankee life, and is well worth studying, not from a few isolated specimens, but from a wide selection. On the whole, Mr. Kempt has performed his task very fairly. He gives some five or six hundred stories, in which the exaggeration of things and the violent dis- location and distortion of associations which form the basis of American humour manifest themselves in all their different phases. We may add, as not unnecessary, that Mr Kempt has carefully excluded anything of an objetionable character.
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