This lecture and his contributions to various newspapers most of which are embodied in his " Book"-form the bulk of his literary work. Some of his letters to Punch, written during his visit to England, are amongst his best efforts. The mask of a rough showman, one of those types so essentially American, enabled him to utter his opinions upon all subjects on every occasion. Perhaps his greatest characteristic was his hatred of all kinds of hypocrisy. And we can well understand how he rejoiced in the opportunities his lecture afforded him of dealing deadly blows at some of the bigoted and immoral practices of the age. Some of his most brilliant jokes are telling thrusts at formalists and shams of every kind. Hingston, his faithful friend and man One of the distinctive features of this prince of humorists was his love of detail. He was not void of power to appreciate the sublime, but the smallest inconsistency or comicality of detail instantly engaged his attention, and the searching lens of his wit was directly turned upon it. He was just the man, in gazing at a magnifi-ager, who had more chances of studying cent mountain landscape, to discover the resemblance of the outline of a rock to the features of a friend. And who but Artemus would remark on returning from a journey, "I come back with my virtue unimpaired, but I forgot to get some new clothes "? 66 The Mormons had always had a great attraction for him. But he rather dreaded the time when in his lecturing tour he would visit Salt Lake City; for in his then recently published "Book" he had most severely denounced them. But his fears were quite groundless, for during his stay in Mormon territory he was most handsomely treated; and admitted, at the conclusion of his tour, that the Mormons were not such "onprincipled retches as he had described. Speaking of them generally, he remarks, "Their religion is singular, but their wives are plural." "Brigham Young," he says, "is an indulgent father and a numerous husband; he is the most married man I ever saw.' He But Artemus Ward was something more than a sparkling humorist. He was a man of character and principle. He was neither an adventurer nor a speculator. Throughout the whole of his works there will not be found one sneer at virtue or religion, and no profanity whatever. says himself, and this is one of the_times when Charles Browne, not Artemus Ward, speaks: "I rarely stain my pages even with mild profanity. It is wicked in the first place, and not funny in the second." There may be an occasional joke not quite in good taste; but in judging this we must consider the difference between the canons of good taste in England and in America. On his visit to England, the Times thus wrote of his lecture: It is utterly free from offence, though the opportunities of offence are obviously numerous. Not only are his jokes irresistible, but his shrewd remarks prove him to be a man of reflection, as well as a consummate humorist. Charles Browne's character than any one, says: "No man had more real reverence in his nature than Artemus Ward." And we can well believe this, when we remember the watchful devotion to his mother which characterized his whole life. Her welfare and happiness were the ultimate aim of all his roving projects and many plans. Though he was by nature most generous, caring but little for money, yet it was chiefly for her sake that he valued the receipts of his lectures; and during his life she never wanted anything that it was in his power to obtain for her. The mask of the showman is sometimes dropped, and Charles Browne's own feelings displayed, though this occurs but seldom. In his interview with the prince Napoleon his comically expressed sentiments are his real opinions. He really means it when he says he "bleeves in morality, likewise in meetin' houses." And the reasons he gives for asking such personal questions about the emperor as he had been doing, are really utterances of his own convictions. "I ax these questions, my royal duke, and most noble highness and imperials, because I'm anxious to know how he stands as a man. I know he's smart. He is cunnin', he is longheaded, he is grate; but onless he is good, he'll come down with a crash one of these days, and the Bonypartes will be busted up again. Bet yer life." His death, from consumption, which took place at Southampton, whither he had gone for his health, was a sudden termination to a most promising life. That he was smart, long-headed, and great, none will deny. He was a most original and brilliant humorist, and a most upright and virtuous man. When Charles Browne signed himself "Artemus Ward" at the end of his first letter to the Cleveland Plaindealer, as the Baldinsville showman, he little thought how soon that title would figure on his coffin-plate; and that, fol THE "foremost captain of his time" was for many years such a familiar figure in London society that his sayings are met with in all contemporary memoirs and journals. But any authentic addition to them is still welcome, and the following extracts have therefore been made from the unpublished commonplace books of the Rev. J. Mitford, of Benhall, who appears to have collected them from his diaries after the duke's death in 1852. Their interest is not lessened by the somewhat rugged form in which they appear, as it shows that they have been in no way "prepared for publication." From the time, just after Waterloo, when Ward (afterwards the first Earl Dudley) found the great duke "quite unspoilt by success, gay, frank, and ready to converse," and Sir William Gell said, "He has none of the airs of a great man at the head of a hundred thousand man-all life and good-humor," to those declining days at Walmer, when Haydon wrote, "He looked like an eagle of the gods who had put on human shape and had got silvery with age and service. . . . His conversation is powerful, humorous, argumentative, sound, moral" - he seems always to have been accessible to his friends and ready to answer the questions which naturally turned on his own career; so that some of the anecdotes told to or narrated by Mr. Mitford have been recorded by other diarists in much the same words. "The Duke of Wellington," writes Mr. Mitford, "is naturally of great gaiety of mind, is remarkable for simplicity, laughs loud and long, like the hooping of the hooping-cough repeated, and listens al ways to others," a courtesy in which the duke himself described one of his royal masters as deficient : • In personal appearance Gell described the duke as "no other than a Buonaparte; so strong a likeness, but with better color." "George the Fourth is no gentleman," the Duke on one occasion said, "though an excellent actor of one for ten minutes. Like Mr. most offensive. Macready, he can't support it longer. His conversation with women Dislikes appearing in public. The King never levées disgraceful; all who sent their names sought good company: the Queen did. His were presented by the lord-in-waiting, driven before him like cattle. He keeps people waiting. The luckiest man in the world, getting into scrapes by misconduct and getting out by good luck. Our royal master must spend a good deal in hush money. No allusions are made in the papers to Lady C—m at the cottage or Brighton. The King never listens nor has he the ideas of a king. I wished him to assemble his pictures: Some better gallery than Lord Strafford or any of time or other,' he said, 'I will, and have a them.' The Emperor Alexander treated him with no respect when here, thinking him only half a king: often kept him waiting-ministers were anxious to set him right. Lord Grenville produced the greatest effect, showing the King every attention at Oxford, and meeting the others only as his guests." The duke had a large acquaintance with monarchs. royal, who has dined with Louis the Eigh"I believe that I am the only person, not teenth," he said. "I sat between Monsieur and the Duc d'Angoulême. They were all waited on by gentlemen; I of course had a servant, and was the best waited on at table. The dinner was exquisite. The King drank champagne and water, dined at six, rose at seven. He is fond of bon mots, and full of esprit rather than sensible. He did not at first consent to read the speeches proposed for him, but spoke d'abondance. I have often dined with the King of the Netherlands. The northern kings admit subjects to dine with them." The war in the Peninsula was naturally a frequent topic with Wellington. Of its historian he said: Napier means well and has good materials, but is too much affected by anything said of him in a newspaper. I should like to tell the truth; but if I did, I should be torn to pieces here and abroad. I have no time to write. Mr. Arbuthnot, in 1826, said on one occasion that "the duke had a high idea of General Moore's talents, and that all be wanted was practice in the command of a large body of troops. At Cintra he said, 'Moore, you and I are the only men, and if you are ready to command Í am ready to serve under you.'" Clausel was the best general employed against me. He gave me a great deal of Readers of Charles Greville will find ample corrob oration of this verdict. trouble.* I once thought I had him, but it pleased a young gentleman to go and dine at a cabaret in the valley a mile or two off. Clausel's reconnoitering party fell in with him; he took the alarm and was off. He is now in America and in disgrace, but if we have a war we shall hear of him again. At Vittoria the French were expecting Clausel. Just then an innkeeper arrived, and was brought to me by Alava. He said, "Make yourself easy about Clausel; I have him snug at my house six leagues off; he is quietly lodged for the night. So saying he left to wait on him. I lost no time. I had intelligence from priests and peasants; the French had none. I used to go alone and reconnoitre the lines up to the piquets. "No French general," said Soult, "would do so without a guard of a thousand men. Marmont spread his army too much at Salamanca, thinking that we should go off. I made a sudden attack on his centre with my whole force in front and rear, and defeated 40,000 men in forty minutes. Marmont was an excellent general officer. The duke said that the following dialogue occurred between an English soldier and a Spanish woman: W. "Don't drink of that well.” were in it. The French were very cruel to their guides. We found the body of one dead. He was taken to show them a particular castle; when in sight of it and he was pointing out what they were in search of, he received a pistol-ball through the back of his head. They had hired him in a neighboring village. Why could they not have imprisoned him for a day? In Spain I never marched the soldiers more than twenty-five miles a day; they set off at five and six, and I was anxious they should take their ground by one. In India I once marched the troops seventy-two miles in a day. In Europe our men cannot do so much. We send the troops by canals - —even smacks; in India they must walk. A soldier requires two pounds of food a day- animal and vegetable, but the first most convenient, as they move themselves. At Orthez I was hit in the hip, but not wounded the only time. [Rogers, the poet, says he bore the pain very badly, and was always complaining.] For many years in the Peninsula I undressed seldom; in the first four years never. I slept five or six hourssometimes three or two. In India it is not the custom to undress; I never did. wished to see an army when in Spain. I said he should be taken along our lines. He returned saying he had seen nothing but little clusters of men in confusion, cooking, washing, sleeping, etc., etc. "Then," I said, "you have seen an army.' There was a spy in the habit of going from camp to camp. We called him "Don Urando de la Rosa," and he dined with us - always talked much. "Who is he?" said Alava. "A Spaniard an Andalusian." No Spaniard," said Alava; "he may be English or anybody else, but no Spaniard." He was always talking as Frenchmen do, and always at my elbow. He had just left the French, and said to me at Pampeluna, when reconnoitering, "Do you wish to see Soult?" "Certainly." "There he is." I looked through my eyeglass, and saw him distinctly on his horse (he was not further than 200 yards), writing a dispatch on his hat, and an aide waiting by him, to whom he gave it, pointing, with much earnestness, in one direction again and again. "I see enough," I said, and gave the glass to another, saying, He galloped off as directed, and I knew at "Observe which way that gentleman goes." once, as I thought, where the attack was to be made, for I knew it was my weakest point. I prepared accordingly, and it answered; of such use, I always maintained, are glasses. The name of this fellow was "Ozilla." terly, I would not let him come near me, and had him always observed so he could not When I was at Paris as shift his quarters. ambassador, he begged me to get his accounts "How can I," I said, with Soult settled. laughing, "when we made such use of you as we did?" However, he got it done. his death a Frenchman came to me in London, and said, after vaporing about Ozilla's services, and declaring that he had won every "Here are his mebattle and saved Europe, moirs; shall I publish or not?" I saw his drift and said, "Do as you please; you must know that he was neither more nor less than I heard no more of him. a spy. Lat After After the Battle of Vittoria the Spaniards said to me, "You came over the English 'Meudon (Basque name for chain of hills). Your Black Prince came over them, and then he fought the battle for Don Pedro the Cruel; at that old castle he had his headquarters.' This agrees with the account in Froissart. I often said Spain would be the ruin of Buonaparte; a conqueror must go on — like a cannon-ball: if it rebounds, its career is over. It was reported at one time that Buonaparte was coming to take the command in Spain. I should have considered his name equal to an additional 40,000 men. I hear nothing with my left ear— the drum is broken; a gun discharged near me might Napoleon's own soldiers. Moscow was burnt by the irregularity of have done it. After his marriage Metternich was sent to Paris to sound him, and see if he meant to be quiet, and to report on his character. His answer was, as he told me, in these words: "He is unaltered." Napoleon was at one time a great econo- | went off. I said to the Diplomatic Corps, mist. He said, between St. Cloud and Paris, to Lauriston, "Why does not the carriage go faster?" "It would," said Lauriston, "if more oats were allowed." "When Marshal Ney left Paris was he resolved to go over to Buonaparte?" Mr. Mitford asked the Duke. "I should say not," was the reply, "but it is impossible to answer for men under certain circumstances, or to say what they will or will not do." The Bourbons had made some alterations in the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and I am told when he left Paris he took the old decoration with him as well as the new. The duke said of Talleyrand, "Yes, he is still living. Le diable en a peur." me... "I never saw Buonaparte," observed the duke, though he was once, during the Battle of Waterloo, within a quarter of a mile of Waterloo! Two such armies so well trained, so well officered! It was a battle of giants. De Lancey was killed at my side; a ball broke his horse's back, knocked him over, and he rebounded after his fall. I was very sorry, but there is no time for sorrow in a battle. He was taken to a barn. I saw him next day. He seemed much better. I said, 'Why de Lancey, you'll be like the man in "Castle Rackrent," you will know what people said of you after your death." Never saw him more. Buonaparte asked Soult whom he had sent to Grouchy. Soult said, "Un officier." "One!" he replied. "Ah mon pauvre Berthier il aurait envoyé quatre.' At Waterloo Buonaparte had the finest army he ever had in his life, full of enthusiasm. Everything up to the battle had turned out favorable to his wishes. He was at his acme at the Peace of Tilsit, and declined gradually afterwards. Buonaparte was as clever a man as ever was, but he wanted sense on many occasions. I think his best plan would have been to have waited for the Allied Armies to have attacked. Then to have singled one out and defeated it. Such a vast body could not have remained assembled without confusion. He never could have hoped to defeat the Prussian army as he did in four hours. The Prussian generals won't expose themselves as ours and the French do, and consequently the troops are not forward in battle. There was only one killed. No wonder that the men don't fight as well as ours. The way in which some of our ensigns and lieutenants - boys just from school-brave danger exceeds belief. The Duke spoke severely of the Nassau regiment. "I found them," he said, "shifting their ground from where they had been stationed at Waterloo. They had formed the rear-guard of the French army in Spain, and came over to us. They were alarmed at the name of Buonaparte, when they heard he was in the field. I expostulated with them, but they were so bewildered they fired on me as I who were with me, 'And I am to win the battle with such as these!' They shrugged their shoulders. Oh! they behaved well afterwards, but Buonaparte's name had frightened them." Creevy went to the Duke after his return to Brussels from Waterloo, to congratulate him. The Duke rejected congratulation, and said, "It was a dreadful business, thirty thousand men destroyed, and a d-d near thing." When the Duke was sitting to Phillips, the latter asked him, "Was not your Grace surprised at Waterloo?" "Never till now," he answered. The duke could generally appreciate even political opponents. He had, writes Mr. Mitford, – a great idea of Lord John Russell. Once, holding Samuel Rogers' arm in St. James's Park in 1845, he said, "Lord John is a host in himself." Some of his table habits were singular. Mr. Mitford says, The Duke at dinner always mixed up all kinds of different things on his plate, a regular olla-podrida. Raikes, in his "Journal," mentions the same peculiarity : At dinner the Duke eats with appetite, mixing, meat, rice, and vegetables into a mess, which fills his plate. He drinks very little wine, and during the evening two decanters of iced water are placed by his side, which are generally empty when he goes to bed. It is curious to find that the greatest triumph experienced by this "hero of a hundred fights" was not won on the field of battle. "I speared seven or eight wild boars in a forest in Picardy," he once Of the Marquis Wellesley, his brother said, Had he been but a younger son he would have been the greatest man in Europe." getting into the carriage at Paris with the Duke, saw him lock the doors inside, and asked him the reason. "A very good one,' replied the Duke. "I have done so ever since I was attacked here while driving, when, "A foolish woman in society," says Raikes in his "Journal," "once asked the duke to give her an ac count of the Battle of Waterloo. 'Oh,' replied he. 'it is very easily done! We pummelled them, they pummelled us, and I suppose we pummelled the hardest, so we gained the day." if my assailants had been less clumsy, I should not have got away. Now should I be attacked, they can only come to the windows, and I should lean back like this"-suiting his action to his words" and be as it were behind a rampart." The duke once observed to a friend, "If any one be disposed to grow giddy with popular applause, I think a glance towards my iron shutters will soon sober him." With regard to those significant iron shutters Raikes has a very impressive passage (Journal, vol. iv., p. 303). shrill, thrice-repeated call of the wryneck. Every season in the country here, as elsewhere, has its dominant musical note, and of the month of March, in Portugal, this note is the wryneck's cry. It comes with a sudden, quite startling music of its own from the still leafless coppice, to tell that the time of bud and leaf and flower is at hand, that le temps a laissie son manteau. The sound, too, has a certain mystery about it, for though the notes are everywhere in the air and every dweller here knows them well and welcomes them, the bird that utters them is very seldom seen. Shortly after the cry is first heard there come many other winged harbingers of warmth and pleasant days, with sweeter, louder, or more contrasted song, but not one of them has, to my thinking, such promise of summer-time in his voice as the wryneck. bingers is one with a fuller and more Among these later-coming spring har "I remember," he says, "when the Duke returned to England after his brilliant campaigns, crowned with the Battle of Waterloo. At that time he was cheered by the people wherever he went, and lauded to the skies. Afterwards, at the period of the Reform Bill, the fickle people forgot all his services, and he was exposed to considerable personal danger. I was in that year at a ball given by him at Apsley House to William the Fourth and his Queen, when the mob were very unruly in their conduct at the gates; and on the follow-musical call, the hoopoe, a bird with as ing days they broke the windows of Apsley strange a note as is heard, I fancy, in the House and did much injury to his property. whole range of ornithology. It is a thriceIt was then that he put up those iron blinds repeated call-note like the wryneck's, but to his windows which remain to this day as a as deep and canorous as the cuckoo's, yet record of the people's ingratitude. Some time so unlike it that I have more than once afterwards, when he had regained all his pop- mistaken it from far off for the baying of ularity, he was riding up Constitution Hill, a beagle. Unlike the wryneck and the followed by an immense mob, who were cheer- cuckoo, there is no mystery of concealing him in every direction. He heard it all with the most stoical indifference, never putment about the hoopoe, as of vox et preterea nihil. He is as often seen as heard, a familiar bird, respected for his tameness even by Portuguese sportsmen, who bring the blackbird to bag, and look on jays and seagulls as legitimate game. ting his horse out of a walk, or seeming to regard them, till he arrived at Apsley House, when he stopped at the gate, turned round to the rabble, and pointing to the iron blinds which closed the windows, made them a sarcastic bow, and entered the court without saying a word." The bird whom the greatest master of ancient comedy made a chief personage "The duke," says Mr. Mitford, "when of his great bird comedy fully justifies the past eighty, in one day, playwright's selection. The hoopoe is the mime of the bird world, as every one who has kept a tame one knows -a bird of high spirits and quick transition of moods,' who is acting a part all day long. Certainly birds, from the vulture and carrion crow to the little grebe and the wren, bear out even more fully than human beings the theory of the old Greeks, that outward appearance testifies to the inner 9. Escorted the last fair dancer to her car- nature. They are fair or foul to view as riage and saluted her at sunrise.' From The Fortnightly Review. SPRINGTIME IN RURAL PORTUGAL. "Le temps a laissie son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye." their dispositions are fair or not. Accordingly, the hoopoe, with his fine, curved, commanding bill, his slim form, brisk carriage, bright coloring, and the magnificent. crest which he raises or lowers as his spirits rise or fall, carries his pleasant and compliant character in full view of all beholders. He comes from Africa when the sun is just midway between the winter and the summer solstices, and helps to make |