ind. 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 audience
laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he
delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1806, 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 the
inadequate nature of the panorama which Browne had had made to
illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the
machinery of this and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few
moments to "work the moon" that shone upon the Great Salt Lake,
apologizing on his return on the ground, that he was "a man short" and
offering "to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage
and education who is a good moonist." When it gradually dawned upon
the British intellect that these and similar devices of the
lecturer--such as the soft music which he had the pianist play at
pathetic passages--nay, that the panorama and even the lecture itself
were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take, and Artemus's
success in England became assured. He was employed as one of the
editors of _Punch_, but died at Southampton in the year following.

Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced, by cacography or bad
spelling, but there was genius in the wildly erratic way in which he
handled even this rather low order of humor. It is a curious
commentary on the wretchedness of our English orthography that the
phonetic spelling of a word, as for example, _wuz_ for _was_, should be
in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different
kind were among his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen
widows of a deceased Mormon offered themselves to Artemus.

"An