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 way across the page. Laying down the pen, the man remarked, "I've been bled by St. Joe fleas, bitten by Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by Fort Scott gray-backs; but hang me if I was ever in a place where these critters looked over the register to take the number of your room."
A Western editor, culminating in his description of a tornado, said, "In short, it was a wind that just sat up on its hind legs and howled."
Some of the Texan cows have been lately described as so thin that it takes two men to see one of them. The men stand back to back, so that one says, "Here she comes!" and the other cries, "There she goes!" Thus between them both the cow is seen.
All these American instances are conceived in the pure Shakspearian blending of the understanding and the imagination. But one more of them, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A coachman, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked by an outside passenger if they were as steep on the other side also. "Steep! Chain lightnin' couldn't go down 'em witheout the breechin' on!"
We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff's character consists. Its humor lies in the tolerance which his inexhaustible wile procures for his vices. We are all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in anybody else it would be outrageous,--"most tolerable and not to be borne." But such a Noachian deluge of animal spirits would carry away a bulkier man than he. It is love of fun more than villainous inclination which leads him into many of his scrapes. When he is moralizing upon his course of life, and half-earnestly complaining that the Prince had been the ruin of him, the latter has only to interrupt this strain with, "Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?" when he drowns his megrims in the jolliest laugh, and draws his belt another hole for an adventure. The midnight frolic, with sack and supper afterwards, attracts him quite as much as the prospect of checking the consumption of his purse. He is quite conscious of a mercurial disposition that keeps the door ajar for every temptation. There are intervals of self-upbraiding--or are they seedy forenoons before the sherris sets in to wet his coast?--when he wishes the Prince were not such a rascally, fascinating companion. And we ought to put to Falstaff's credit the fact that to be hail-fellow with a prince has unsettled many a sterner virtue; and he says flatly to him that he wishes they knew "where a commodity of good names were to be bought."