_Josh Billings._--With these three characteristics in mind we may now give some brief attention to the humourists themselves. Of the “boisterous school” the earliest were Henry Wheeler Shaw, Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, and Charles Farrar Browne. If by chance these names seem quite unfamiliar, the strangeness will disappear when attention is called to the fact that the three men respectively wrote under the _noms de plume_ of “Josh Billings,” “Mrs. Partington,” and “Artemus Ward.” Shaw (1818-1885) was born in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, and died in Monterey, California. To complete his formal education he entered Hamilton College in Clinton, New York; but tiring of the life there, he went on to the West and spent a number of years undergoing the many experiences offered by frontier life. Returning East in 1858, he became an auctioneer in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he also began to contribute to various magazines and newspapers. He attracted little attention until he invented an amusing system of phonetic spelling supposed to represent his homely method of pronunciation. His chief works were his “Farmer’s Allminax” published annually between 1870 and 1880, “Every Boddy’s Friend” (1876), and “Josh Billings’ Spice Box” (1881). A quotation or two will exhibit both the thought and the form which characterise the contents of his several volumes of writing: “Fallin’ in luv is like fallin’ in molases--sweet but drefful dobby.” “Yu can’t tell what makes a kis taste so good eny more than you kin a peech. Eny man who kin set down wher it is cool and tell what a kis tastes like hain’t got eny more taste in his mouth than a knot-hol hez.” _Mrs. Partington._--Benjamin P. Shillaber (1814-1890) was influenced by Sheridan even more strongly than was Saxe by the elder Hood. Mrs. Partington is America’s Mrs. Malaprop. Her misuse of the English language Shillaber recorded in three books bearing the several titles, “Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington” (1854), “Partingtonian Patchwork” (1873), and “Ike and his Friend” (1879). Mrs. Partington’s likeness to her English predecessor, or, as she would undoubtedly have said, her “predecessoress,” may be seen in her chance remark: “I am not so young as I was once, and I don’t believe I shall ever be, if I live to the age of Samson, which, heaven knows as well as I do, I don’t want to, for I wouldn’t be a centurion or an octagon and survive my factories and become idiomatic by any means. But then there is no knowing how a thing will turn out till it takes place, and we shall come to an end some day, though we may never live to see it.”