as had its funny column. Our humorists have
been graduated from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the
printing-press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has risen
into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new humorist, as in the
case of G. D. Prentice's _Courier Journal_, or more recently of the
_Cleveland Plaindealer_, the _Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_,
the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the _Texas Siftings_, and numerous others.
Nowadays there are even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to
supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, the great
majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and comic
almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that
the best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, will not long continue
to be read as illustrative of one side of the American mind, or that
their best things will not survive as long as the _mots_ of Sydney
Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of them
was Seba Smith, who, under the name of "Major Jack Downing," did his
best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. Shillaber's
"Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed great
vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the
_Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George
H. Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the
Pacific coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's
proposal for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account
of the topographical survey of the two miles of road between San
Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of
the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway Negroes, and
other designs which used to figure in the advertising columns of the
newspapers, were all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale
before Artemus Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called
him--who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a
hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea
Biglow, an imaginary personage of some sort, under cover of whom the
author might conceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to our
humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling showman who went about the
country exhibiting a collection of wax "figgers" and whose experiences
and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most
ingeniously eccentric k