[13] I wish to confess my obligation to this interesting book for much help in writing the present chapter.
[14] A match played in no less aristocratic a place than Newport on Sept. 2, 1897, between the local team and a club from Brockton, ended in a general scrimmage, in which even women joined in the cry of "Kill the umpire!"
[15] It is, perhaps, only fair to quote on the other side the opinion of Mr. Rudolf Lehmann, the well-known English rowing coach, who witnessed the match between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in 1897. He writes in the London _News_: "I have never seen a finer game played with a manlier spirit. The quickness and the precision of the players were marvellous.... The game as I saw it, though it was violent and rough, was never brutal. Indeed, I cannot hope to see a finer exhibition of courage, strength, and manly endurance, without a trace of meanness."
And to Mr. Lehmann's voice may be added that of a "Mother of Nine Sons," who wrote to the Boston _Evening Transcript_ in 1897, speaking warmly of the advantages of football in the formation of habits of self-control and submission to authority.
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections." So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the American. John Bull's downrightness appears in his jests also. His jokes must be unmistakable; he wants none of your quips masquerading as serious observations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. "Those animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to say in showing his panorama. "I know they are--because my artist says so. I had the picture two years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six months ago and said, 'It is useless to disguise it from you any longer--they are horses.'"[16] This is the form of introduction that John Bull prefers for his witticisms. He will welcome a joke as hospitably as a visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the other are unimpeachable.