following London fashionable season, there is little doubt that the
room at the Egyptian Hall would have been thronged nightly. Our
aristocracy have a fine delicate sense of humour, and the success,
artistic and pecuniary, of "Artemus Ward" would have rivalled that
of the famous "Lord Dundreary." There are many stupid people who
did not understand the "fun" of Artemus Ward's books. In their
vernacular "they didn't see it." There were many stupid people who
did not understand the fun of Artemus Ward's lecture on the Mormons.
They could not see it. Highly respectable people--the pride of
their parish, when they heard of a lecture "upon the Mormons"-
-expected to see a solemn person, full of old saws and new
statistics, who would denounce the sin of polygamy, and bray against
polygamists with four-and-twenty boiling-water Baptist power of
denunciation. These uncomfortable Christians do not like humour.
They dread it as a certain personage is said to dread holy water,
and for the same reason that thieves fear policemen--it finds them
out. When these good idiots heard Artemus offer, if they did not
like the lecture in Piccadilly, to give them free tickets for the
same lecture in California, when he next visited that country, they
turned to each other indignantly, and said "What use are tickets for
California to us? We are not going to California. No! we are too
good, too respectable, to go so far from home. The man is a fool!"
One of these ornaments of the vestry complained to the doorkeepers,
and denounced the lecture as an imposition; "and," said the wealthy
parishioner, "as for the panorama, it's the worst painted thing I
ever saw in all my life!"

But the entertainment, original, humorous, and racy though it was,
was drawing to a close! In the fight between youth and death, death
was to conquer. By medical advice Charles Browne went for a short