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But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes smooth show from those that knew their predecessors in the earlier decade! I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of by Artemus Ward as "a sweet boon," so vividly remembered by me as the scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the Tower menagerie.
The whole English school of wits with Douglas Jerrold, Hood, Sheridan, and Sidney Smith, indulged in repartee. They were PARASITIC wits. And so with the Irish, except that an Irishman is generally so ridiculously absurd in his replies as to only excite ridicule. "Artemus Ward" made you laugh and love him too. The wit of "Artemus Ward" and "Josh Billings" is distinctively American.
Maintaining a very grave countenance himself, he plays upon the muscles of other people's faces as though they were piano- strings, and he the prince of pianists. "The story of 'The Babes in the Wood' is interesting in the extreme. We would say, en passant, however, that Artemus Ward is a perfect steam factory of puns and a museum of American humour.
"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat as Artemus Ward once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it no longer at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But first of all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not a policeman or a dude is a workingman.
But I guess he'll keep pretty straight. He hasn't got any money, for one thing." Staniford laughed. "He stops drinking for obvious reasons, if for no others, like Artemus Ward's destitute inebriate. Did you think only of us in deciding whether you should take him?" The captain looked up quickly at the young men, as if touched in a sore place.
If Clemens lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak without censorship.
Throughout this brief sketch I have written familiarly of the late Mr. Charles F. Browne as "Artemus Ward," or simply as "Artemus." I have done so advisedly, mainly because, during the whole course of our acquaintance, I do not remember addressing him as "Mr. Browne," or by his real Christian name. To me he was always "Artemus" Artemus the kind, the gentle, the suave, the generous.
Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had passed from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during half a century I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London experiences revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness between them.
The soldiers from Rumford, having unbounded confidence in Robert Walden, elected him lieutenant. When General Artemus Ward, commanding the troops at Cambridge, asked Colonel Stark if he had a trustworthy young man whom he could recommend to execute an important order, Lieutenant Walden was selected and directed to report at general headquarters.
What, I wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more nearly to ours than Chaucer's! The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously expressive as well.
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