Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time.
The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as
is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed
with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan should
involve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installment
of a fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man in
permanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which to
express his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personal
danger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overrate
the importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility.
The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-appointed judge an
exaggerated sense of superiority.
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