hold a rein with? Why, the horse would laugh at them."

Having collected a sufficient number of quaint thoughts, whimsical
fancies, bizarre notions, and ludicrous anecdotes, the difficulty
which then, according to his own confession, occurred to Artemus
Ward was, what should be the title of his lecture. The subject was
no difficulty at all, for the simple reason that there was not to be
any. The idea of instructing or informing his audience never once
entered into his plans. His intention was merely to amuse; if
possible, keep the house in continuous laughter for an hour and a
half, or rather an hour and twenty minutes, for that was the precise
time, in his belief, which people could sit to listen and to laugh
without becoming bored; and, if possible, send his audience home
well pleased with the lecturer and with themselves, without their
having any clear idea of that which they had been listening to, and
not one jot the wiser than when they came. No one better understood
than Artemus the wants of a miscellaneous audience who paid their
dollar or half-dollar each to be amused. No one could gauge better
than he the capacity of the crowd to feed on pure fun, and no one
could discriminate more clearly than he the fitness, temper, and
mental appetite of the constituents of his evening assemblies. The
prosiness of an ordinary Mechanics' Institute lecture was to him
simply abhorrent; the learned platitudes of a professed lecturer
were to him, to use one of his own phrases, "worse than poison." To
make people laugh was to be his primary endeavour. If in so making
them laugh he could also cause them to see through a sham, be
ashamed of some silly national prejudice, or suspicious of the value
of some current piece of political bunkum, so much the better. He
believed in laughter as thoroughly wholesome; he had the firmest
conviction that fun is healthy, and sportiveness the truest sign of