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Even in the latest years of his life, though long since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of thoughtless laughter. "It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter," Mr.
One of the popular ways of attacking an obnoxious political doctrine in that day was writing letters from some imaginary backwoods settlement, setting forth in homely vernacular the writer's views of the question, and showing how its application affected his part of the world. These letters were really a rude form of the "Bigelow Papers" or "Nasby Letters."
The mass described a hedge to let him pass. He thought that he heard one of them remark: "That is a common-looking fellow!" To whom Lincoln replied still in the dream: "Friend, the Lord loves common-looking people that is why He made so many of them." It is difficult for the present generation to perceive the streak of fun in "the Petroleum V. Nasby Papers" which regaled our grandfathers, and Mr.
P. V. Nasby, and one or two others of less note, are a kind of personages which no other society has produced, and could in no other society attain equal celebrity.
His world was that of the popular song, the middle-class actor or comedian, the middle-class comedy, and such humorous æsthetes of the writing world as Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, the authors of the Spoopendyke Papers, and "Samantha at Saratoga."
We were glad to see Näsby and its two-story inn once more. The pleasant little handmaiden smiled all over her face when she saw us again. Näsby is a crack place: the horses were ready at once, and fine creatures they were, taking us up the Kalix to Månsbyn, eight miles in one hour. The road was hard as a rock and smooth as a table, from much ploughing and rolling.
It was eminently characteristic of Lincoln that the presentation to the Cabinet of the Emancipation Proclamation was prefaced by the reading of the latest Nasby letter. Lincoln's statement in the Autobiography that he had picked up the little advance he had made upon his early education, or rather lack of education, is altogether too modest.
Away he goes, past painted houses and staring signs and gilded church-towers past dark, narrow shop-doors like exaggerated rat-traps, with a keen, well-whiskered tenant peering watchfully out of each past clamorous groups of blue-frocked, red-girdled cabmen past sheepskin-clad beggars, each with his little tablet stamped with a gilt cross to show that the alms bestowed are to be devoted to the building of some apocryphal church, probably of the same kind as that spoken of by Petroleum V. Nasby: "The proceeds air to be devoted entirely to the 'church' which is me."
Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French moralists: "It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering him in his own estimashun, and yures too." See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire. It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads," Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education.
It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye these are already obsolescent names.
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