Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[132] Philip Sidney's ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ the other day, I was not at all surprised to find that, of the thousand copies printed, one-quarter were for the American market, and that these were to be issued from Chicago. And yet so fixed is this habit of joking in the mind of our people that it will probably last an indefinite period into the future, and keep all the intellectual impulses of that particular city in the kind of uncomfortable self-consciousness which comes from being always on the defensive. In time such an attitude is outgrown, and people are left to enjoy what they like. I can remember when the disposition of Bostonians to take pleasure in Beethoven's symphonies was almost as much of a joke to Boston editors as is the ‘humming’ of culture in Chicago to-day; but there is fortunately a limit to human endurance in regard to certain particular witticisms, though some of them certainly die hard.

The same necessity for a joke invades other quiet enjoyments and harmless occupations, as the study of Shakespeare or Browning. It has happened to me to look in at several different