igure, as
essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London,
with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in
Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He
did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and
other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my
hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone.
It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I
scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
humor which characterizes the whole American people.

I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and