corruptions of speech, have come to talk of "newspaper English," as if it were in some way related to the "pigeon English" spoken at Hongkong or Canton? Who will take the club of a philologist and knock on the head the more than one hundred corrupt words and slang phrases which have obtained more or less currency through the public journals of our own State? If by accident the club should descend upon the head of any coiner of such vulgarity, be assured that small damage will be done.

One can not fail to note that the newspaper has been gradually encroaching on the domain of literature. It has absorbed monthly magazines or forced publishers to resort to illustrations to a sort of picture-book literature for grownup children. It has driven the lumbering quarterlies into smaller fields and diminished their relative importance. The average citizen craves the news from a journal having the very dew of the morning and the evening upon it. It must come to him damp and limp, bringing whatever is best at the smallest possible cost. The newspaper is the herald of the new era. Its errand must be swift, its statements compact, and its thought eclectic and comprehensive.

Three thousand years ago one of the grand old prophets spoke mysteriously of the "living spirit in the wheels." Was it other than the modern newspaper thrown off by the pulsing of the great cylinder press? But observe that through yonder Golden Gate, which the sun and the stars and the lamps of men glorify day and night, the devil-fish comes sailing up, and is no whit concerned whether his accursed tentacula close around saint or sinner. Is not that the fittest symbol of a public journal conducted by ignorant and unscrupulous men? Rather would you not choose, as a more fitting symbol of the ideal journal, one of the small globules

of quicksilver which you shall find on any of these encircling hills, so powerless to draw to it an atom of filth or rubbish, but ever attracting the smallest particle of incorruptible silver and gold?

It can hardly have escaped notice that California, during this quarter-century, has produced more humorists, and more of that literature which is essentially humorous, than all the rest of the country. It may be difficult to trace to any outward sources the inspiration of so much wit. Does it lie in the odd contrasts and strange situations which so often confront the observer here? Nor has this facetiousness depended at all for its development upon any degree of prosperity. In fact, the boldest and bravest challenge which has ever been given to adverse fortune here has been by the gentle humorists who have suffered from her slings and arrows. It is said: "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." But these modern satirists made faces at bad fortune; they lampooned her, and defied her to do her utmost. The more miserable they ought to have been, the happier they were. They found a grotesque and comic side to the most sober facts. They were facetious when there was small stock in the larder and smaller credit at the banker's. They smiled at the very grimness of evil fortune until she fled, and, in doing this, they half-unconsciously tickled the midriff of the world. A ripple of laughter ran over the surface of society. It sometimes made slow progress when it here and there met a mountain of obtuseness. But wit is wit; and what difference does it make if, failing to see the point, some people laugh next year instead of this? I will not be distressed because my friend does not, to this day, see how the immortal “Squibob” conquered his adversary at San Diego by falling underneath him and inserting his nose between his teeth. Nor does it

If

Possibly there is something favorable to the play of humor in a greater freedom from conventional limitations. one grows into this larger liberty, or is translated into it, a flavor of freshness comes to pervade all the intellectual life. A certain spontaneity of expression, a spring, a rioting song of gladness, are some of the signs of this more abounding life. In homely phrase, we say there is a flavor of the soil about it. It might, therefore, have been necessary that Mark Twain should sleep on this soil, and should have a wide range of pioneer experiences, before he could become the prince of grotesque humorists. He got up suddenly from the very soil which in its secret laboratory colors the olive and the orange, and began to make the world laugh. With a keen sense of the symmetry and harmony of things, he had a keener perception of all the shams and ridiculous aspects of life. His pungent gospel of humor is as sanitary as a gentle trade-wind. He knew a better secret than the old alchemists. Every time he made the world laugh he put a thousand ducats into his pocket. But never until he had slept in his blankets, had been robbed on the "Divide," and had learned the delicate cookery of a miner's cabin, could he do this thing. But now he can not even weep at the tomb of his ancestor, Adam, without moving the risibles of half the world. He has also a finer touch and flavor,

not of the rankest soil, but of that which gives the aroma and delicate bouquet to the rarest mountain-side vintage. When this man had tried his wit on a Californian audience and had won an approving nod, he had an indorsement which was good in any part of the English-speaking world.

Of a more subtile wit and a finer grain was Harte, who did his best work as a humorist in California. All his earlier triumphs were won here. His subsequent indorsement in a wider field was only an affirmation of this earlier public judgment.

Sometimes in the thicket one may come upon a wild mocking-bird which is running up the gamut of its riotous burlesque upon the song of every other bird, and the sound of every living thing in the forest. But when all this is done, that mocking-bird will sometimes give out a song which none other can match with its melody. As much as this, and more, lay within the range of this poetsatirist. His mocking had, however, a deep and salient meaning in it. When Truthful James rises to explain in what respect Ah Sin is peculiar, he has a higher purpose than merely to show the overreaching cunning of this bronzed heathen,

"With the smile that was child-like and bland."

So long as Ah Sin and his race could be plucked and despoiled at will, he provoked no antagonisms. But when he overmatched the sharpness of his spoilers, we have this tale, with its moral:

"Then I looked up at Nye,
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,

And said, 'Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'

And he went for that heathen Chinee."

Every demagogue in the State, who had rung the changes on the evils of cheap labor, felt the thrust; and it is doubtful if one of them has forgiven Harte to this day.

camp-fire drop their cards as one of them draws forth a book:

"And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,

When Jones undertook to prove that certain fossil bones were from one of his lost mules, then the trouble began:

"Now I hold it is not decent for any scientific gent To say another is an ass-at least, to all intent; Nor should the individual who happens to be meant Reply by heaving rocks at him, to any great extent. "Then Abner Dean of Angel's raised a point of order, when

A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,

And he smiled a sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,

And the subsequent proceedings interested him no

more.

"For in less time than I write it every member did engage

In a warfare with the remnants of the paleozoic age;

And the way they heaved those fossils in their anger was a sin,

Till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thompson in."

When the supposed pliocene skull, found in Calaveras County, had developed a good deal of scientific quackery, Harte, in his "Geological Address," makes the skull declare that it belonged to Joe Bowers of Missouri, who had fallen down a shaft. For six months thereafter no theorist was able to discuss the character of that fossil with a sober countenance. No Damascus blade ever cut with keener stroke than did the blade of this satirist, even when it was hidden in a madrigal or concealed in some polished sentence of prose.

As a humorist he appreciated humor in others. When Dickens died, not another man in all the length and breadth of the land contributed so tender and beautiful a tribute to his memory as did Harte in his poem of "Dickens in

And as the fire-light fell,

He read aloud the book wherein the master
Had writ of Little Nell.'

"Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy-for the reader
Was youngest of them all-
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar

A silence seemed to fall.

"Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire,
And he who wrought that spell?-
Ah! towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!

"Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills

With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.

"And on that grave where English oak, and holly, And laurel wreaths entwine,

Deem it not all a too-presumptuous folly

This spray of western pine!"

It was left to this shy man, who came forth from the very wastes of this far-off wilderness, to lay upon the bier of the dead humorist as fragrant an offering as any mortal fellowship could suggest. It was a song in a different key-as if one having entered into the very life of the great novelist had also for a moment entered into his death.

The wit and the poetry which ripen here are under the same sun which ripens the pomegranate and the citron. The grain and texture have always been better than that suggested by the coarser materialism without. It is little to him who is cutting his marble to the divinest form, that the whole city reeks with grime and smoke, and all its outlines are misshapen and ugly. It is little to poet or painter that sometimes the earth has only a single tint of gray, since he may sometimes see in contrast what a trans

and on sea.

There are not at any time in this dull world so many genuine humorists as one may count on his fingers. For lack of some healthy laughter the world is going to the bad. It welcomes the gentle missionary of humor, and for lack of him it sometimes accepts those dreary counterfeits who commit assault and battery on our mother-tongue. As in olden time the prophets were sometimes stoned in their own country, so in modern times one can not tell whether the poetprophet who comes up from the wilderness will fare better or worse. Woe to him if the people can not interpret him, or are piqued at his coming. It is a curious fact that when Harte had brought forth his first book with the modest title of Outcroppings, it was pelted from one end of the State to the other. It did not contain a poem of his own. But it did contain samples of the best poetry other than his own which had been produced in California. His critics, catching the suggestion of the title, flung at him porphyry, granite, and barren quartz, but never a rock containing a grain of gold. He might have put a torpedo into a couple of stanzas and extinguished them all. But he saw the humorous side of the assault, and enjoyed it with a keener zest than any of his assailants.

None of us would be comfortable with only some pungent sauce for dinner. But when a dreadful staleness overtakes the world, it is ready to cry out, "More sauce!" Whoever comes, therefore, bringing with him salt and seasoning, and whatever else gives a keener zest to life, never comes amiss. Sooner or later we shall know him. He will come very near to us in his books, and by that subtile law of communion which through the brightest and noblest utterances makes all the better world akin. After we have seen the trick of the magician, we do not care to know him

works by an enchantment that we can never despise. His spell is wrought with such gifts as are only given from the very heavens to here and there one. It is not the mythical Puck who is to put a girdle round the world, but the man of genius, whose thought is luminous with the light of all ages. So' Shakspeare clasps the world, and Dickens belts it, and the men of wit and genius furnish each a golden thread which girds it about. The book of humor is the heart's ease. In every library it is dog-eared, because it has in it some surcease for the secret ills of life. If a million souls have been made happier for an hour through the fictions of Sir Walter Scott, what is the sum of good thus wrought! What lesser good have they wrought who have come in later times to lighten the dead weight of our overweighted lives?

Do not despise the evangel of humor because he comes unlike one of old, wearing a girdle of camel's hair, and eating his locusts and wild honey. Bear with him if he comes in flaming neck-tie and flamingo vestments, hirsute and robust. You shall know by his wit that he is no charlatan; but you can not tell it by his raiment, nor his bill of fare. It can not be shown that the wit of Diogenes was any better for his living in a tub. It is not probable that a diet of water-cress would inspire a better humor than a flagon of wine and a saddle of venison. I would rather look for your modern humorist in the top story of the crowded and garish hostelry; because if he is after game he will be sure to find it there.

Another humorist, radically the product of California, was Prentice Mulford. When it was found that the boy had a genuine vein of wit in him, recognized alike in the brilliant salon and the miner's camp, he was sent forth as another missionary to reclaim the world.

Stoddard went through a gentle transition from poetry to prose, becoming subordinately a humorist because he could not help it. If he excites no boisterous mirth, so much the better. The best wine hath a delicate bouquet; so subtile, indeed, that one must taste often and daintily to know its better quality.

Without exhausting the list, these five humorists, both in quality and number, as the product of one State in a quarter of a century, exceed the product of all the rest of the Union.

The exacting conditions of pioneer life are not favorable to authorship. If during this quarter of a century not a book had been written in California, we might plead in mitigation the overshadowing materialism which, while coarsely wrestling for the gains of a day, finds no place for that repose which favors culture and is fruitful of books. But over the arid plains, in the heat and dust of the long summer, one may trace the belt of green which the mountain stream carries sheer down to the sea. So there have been many thoughtful men and women who have freshened and somewhat redeemed these intellect ual wastes. They have written more books in this quarter of a century than the great State of Ohio has produced in fifty years; more, in fact, than have been written in all the other States west of the Mississippi River. The publication of some of these books has cost nearly their weight in gold. During this period of twenty-five years, more than 150 volumes have been written by persons living at the time in this State.*

The following is a list of books written in California. Law reports, digests, and school-books are omitted. History of Oregon and California....R. Greenhow. View of California..... ........Alfred Robinson. Three Years in California.. .J. D. Borthwick. Three Years in California.. Walter Colton. What I saw in California.. .Edwin Bryant. Colonial History of San Francisco. John W. Dwinelle. History of California..............Franklin Tuthill.

Many of these books have had but a local circulation, and are now almost forgotten. Some have gained more than a national reputation. I enumerate among these Halleck's International Law; Mountaineering, by Clarence King; Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America, by Captain Scammon; The Luck of Roar ing Camp, by Bret Harte; and Native Races, by Hubert H. Bancroft. Another work just missed a more than national recognition. Grayson, the self-taught and heroic naturalist, traversed the forests and swamps of Mexico, stopping neither for morass nor jungle, until he had drawn and painted to life more than a hundred of the rarest birds of that country. His work, which is still in sheets and manuscript, was probably at the cost of his life. But, besides the works of Audubon and Wilson, I know of nothing better in its way by any naturalist, living or dead.

In this more notable list the OVERLAND MONTHLY is justly entitled to a place, because it has not only been read in every State in the Union, but has had a considerable circulation in Europe. It is more than seven years since the first number was issued. Fifteen octavo volumes now represent the aggregate numbers, and they are essentially the product of California writers. Ignoring all provincial limitations, they not only gave to the magazine a cosmopolitan charac ter, but they made it the exponent of a literature which did not fall behind that of any other magazine in the country.

You will not have to go far to find some sheltered valley, where both orLieutenant Derby.

Phoenixiana.....
California, Indoors and Out.....Eliza W. Farnham.
California Life Illustrated.. .......William Taylor.
Dow's Patent Sermons........
.Dow, Jr.
Sermons on the Decalogue.. ....D. F. McDonald.
Poems..
......Mrs. C. A. Chamberlain.
Life on the Plains and in the Diggings...A. Delano.
Los Gringos......
Lieutenant Wise.
The Republic of Nicaragua.......William V. Wells.
Mountains and Molehills........... Frank Marryat