undertaken--that of amusing the public with a humorous lecture. He
understood and comprehended to a hair's breadth the grand secret of
how not to bore. He had weighed, measured, and calculated to a
nicety the number of laughs an audience could indulge in on one
evening, without feeling that they were laughing just a little too
much. Above all, he was no common man, and did not cause his
audience to feel that they were laughing at that which they should
feel ashamed of being amused with. He was intellectually up to the
level of nine-tenths of those who listened to him, and in listening,
they felt that it was no fool who wore the cap and bells so
excellently. It was amusing to notice how with different people his
jokes produced a different effect. The Honourable Robert Lowe
attended one evening at the Mormon Lecture, and laughed as
hilariously as any one in the room. The next evening Mr. John
Bright happened to be present. With the exception of one or two
occasional smiles, he listened with grave attention.

In placing the lecture before the public in print, it is impossible,
by having recourse to any system of punctuation, to indicate the
pauses, jerky emphases, and odd inflexions of voice which
characterised the delivery. The reporter of the Standard newspaper,
describing his first lecture in London, aptly said: "Artemus dropped
his jokes faster than the meteors of last night succeeded each other
in the sky. And there was this resemblance between the flashes of
his humour and the flights of the meteors, that in each case one
looked for jokes or meteors, but they always came just in the place
that one least expected to find them. Half the enjoyment of the
evening lay, to some of those present, in listening to the hearty
cachinnation of the people who only found out the jokes some two or
three minutes after they were made, and who then laughed apparently