The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (HTML edition)Ward, Artemus
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The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (HTML edition)
Ward, Artemus
American wit and humor
Dr. Hingston "thanks God he never wrote against the Mormons," and goes
out in search of a brother nglishman. Comes back at night and says
there is a prejudice against me. Advises me to keep in. Has heard that
the Mormons thirst for my blood and are on the lookout for me.
Under these circumstances I keep in.
The next day is Sunday, and we go to the Tabernacle, in the morning.
The Tabernacle is located on ---- street, and is a long rakish building
of adobe, capable of seating some twenty-five hundred persons. There
is a wide platform and a rather large pulpit at one end of the building,
and at the other end is another platform for the choir. A young
Irishman of the name of Sloan preaches a sensible sort of discourse, to
which a Presbyterian could hardly have objected. Last night this
same Mr. Sloan enacted a character in a rollicking Irish farce at the
theatre! And he played it well, I was told; not so well, of course,
as the great Dan Bryant could; but I fancy he was more at home in the
Mormon pulpit than Daniel would have been.
The Mormons, by the way, are preeminently an amusement-loving people,
and the Elders pray for the success of their theatre with as much
earnestness as they pray for anything else. The congregation doesn't
startle us. It is known, I fancy, that the heads of the Church are to
be absent to-day, and the attendance is slim. There are no ravishingly
beautiful women present, and no positively ugly ones. The men are fair
to middling. They will never be slain in cold blood for their beauty,
nor shut up in jail for their homeliness.
There are some good voices in the choir to-day, but the orchestral
accompaniment is unusually slight. Sometimes they introduce a full
brass and string band in Church. Brigham Young says the devil has
monopolized the good music long enough, and it is high time the Lord had
a portion of it. Therefore trombones are tooted on Sundays in Utah as
well as on other days; and there are some splendid musicians there. The
Orchestra in Brigham Young's theatre is quite equal to any in Broadway.
There is a youth in Salt Lake City (I forget his name) who plays the
cornet like a North American angel.
Mr. Stenhouse relieves me of any anxiety I had felt in regard to
having my swan-like throat cut by the Danites, but thinks my wholesale
denunciation of a people I had never seen was rather hasty. The
following is the paragraph to which the Saints objected. It occurs in
an "Artemus Ward" paper on Brigham Young, written some years ago:
"I girded up my Lions and fled the Seen. I packt up my duds and left
Salt Lake, which is a 2nd Soddum and Germorer, inhabited by as theavin'
& onprincipled a set of retchis as ever drew Breth in eny spot on the
Globe."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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