ajor Jack
Downing, did his best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P.
Shillaber's "Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed
great vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the
_Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George H.
Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific
coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's proposal
for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account of the
topographical survey of the two miles of road between San Francisco and
the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of the conventional
houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway negroes {565} and other designs
which used to figure in the advertising columns of the newspapers, were
all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale before Artemus
Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called him--who first
secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing and
reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea Biglow, an imaginary
personage of some sort, under cover of whom the author might conceal his
own identity, has seemed a necessity to our humorists. Artemus Ward was
a traveling showman who went about the country exhibiting a collection of
wax "figgers" and whose experiences and reflections were reported in
grammar and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor
was Charles F. Browne, originally of Maine, a printer by trade and
afterward a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo and Cleveland,
where his comicalities in the _Plaindealer_ first began to attract
notice. In 1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of _Vanity
Fair_, a comic weekly of much brightness, which ran a short career and
perished for want of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public
lecturer people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of
the shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a
gentlemanly-looking young man, who came upon the platform in correct
evening dress, and "spoke his piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful
manner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the {566} audience
laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he
delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1866, the gravity of his
bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in
search of instructive information and were disappointed at