There was one peculiarity about Charles Browne--He never made an enemy.  Other wits in other times have been famous, but a satirical thrust now and then has killed a friend.  Diogenes was the wit of Greece, but when, after holding up an old dried fish to draw away the eyes of Anaximenes' audience, he exclaimed "See how an old fish is more interesting than Anaximenes," he said a funny thing, but he stabbed a friend.  When Charles Lamb, in answer to the doting mother's question as to how he liked babies, replied, "b-b-boiled, madam, boiled!" that mother loved him no more: and when John Randolph said "thank you!" to his constituent who kindly remarked that he had the pleasure of passing his house, it was wit at the expense of friendship.  The whole English school of wits--with Douglas Jerrold, Hood, Sheridan, and Sidney Smith, indulged in repartee.  They were parasitic wits.  And so with the Irish, except that an Irishman is generally so ridiculously absurd in his replies as to only excite ridicule.  "Artemus Ward" made you laugh and love him too. The wit of "Artemus Ward" and "Josh Billings" is distinctively American.  Lord Kames, in his "Elements of Criticism," makes no mention of this species of wit, a lack which the future rhetorician should look to.  We look in vain for it in the English language of past ages, and in other languages of modern time.  It is the genus American.  When Artemus says in that serious manner, looking admiringly at his atrocious pictures,--"I love pictures--and I have many of them--beautiful photographs--of myself;" you smile; and when he continues, "These pictures were painted by the Old Masters; they painted these pictures and then they--they expired;" you hardly know what it is that makes you laugh outright; and when Josh Billings says in his Proverbs, wiser than Solomon's "You'd better not know so much, than know so many things that ain't so;"--the same vein is struck, but the text-books fail to explain scientifically the cause of our mirth. The wit of Charles Browne is of the most exalted kind.  It is only scholars and those thoroughly acquainted with the subtilty of our language who fully appreciate it.  His wit is generally about historical personages like Cromwell, Garrick, or Shakspeare, or a burlesque on different styles of writing, like his French novel, when hifalutin phrases of tragedy come from the clodhopper who--"sells soap and thrice--refuses a ducal coronet." Mr. Browne mingled the eccentric even in his business letters.  Once he wrote to his Publisher, Mr. G.W. Carleton, who had made some alterations in his MSS.: "The next book I write I'm going to get you to write."  Again he wrote in 1863: "Dear Carl:--You and I will get out a book next spring, which will knock spots out of all comic books in ancient or modern history. And the fact that you are going to take hold of it convinces me that you have one of the most massive intellects of this or any other epoch.