and his picture gallery made out of the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway Negroes, 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 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.