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What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller: Charles Farrar Brown, better known to the public of thirty years ago under his pen-name of Artemus Ward, was born in the little village of Waterford, Maine, on the 26th day of April, 1834.
He had gone from Cleveland to London, with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple.
Then comes news from America and the lists of New Councillors elected: 'Artemus Ward, Francis Dana, Oliver Prescott, Samuel Baker, while a very suitable sermon on the occasion is preached by the Rev. Mr. Stillman of Boston. How familiar the names all sound!
Before Christmas, Artemus received invitations from distinguished people, nobility and gentry as well as men of letters, to spend the week-end with them. But he declined them all. He needed his vacation, he said, for rest. He had neither the strength nor the spirit for the season. Yet was he delighted with the English people and with English life.
He who generalises is lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be collected. And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."
Like Talleyrand, he was of opinion that "Qui vit sans jolie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit." Artemus Ward's first lecture was entitled "The Babes in the Wood." I asked him why he chose that title, because there was nothing whatever in the lecture relevant to the subject of the child-book legend. He replied, "It seemed to sound the best.
Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the masses.
From "Complete Works of Artemus Ward" with the permission of the G. W. Dillingham Company, New York, publishers. I don't expect to do great things here but I have thought that if I could make money enough to buy me a passage to New Zealand I should feel that I had not lived in vain. I don't want to live in vain. I'd rather live in Texas or here.
Where do they live, how do they live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How can they read Artemus Ward under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think loveliest in all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a hundred years ago.
The easiest part of this task was that of reading humorous books to J. P. When he was in the right mood and would submit to the process, I read to him the greater part of "Dooley," of Artemus Ward, of Max Adler, and portions of W. W. Jacobs, of Lorimer's Letters of a Self-made Merchant to His Son, of Mrs. Anne Warner's Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs.
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