He had weighed, measured, and calculated to a nicety the number of laughs an audience could indulge in on one evening, without feeling that they were laughing just a little too much. Above all, he was no common man, and did not cause his audience to feel that they were laughing at that which they should feel ashamed of being amused with. He was intellectually up to the level of nine-tenths of those who listened to him, and in listening, they felt that it was no fool who wore the cap and bells so excellently. It was amusing to notice how with different people his jokes produced a different effect. The Honourable Robert Lowe attended one evening at the Mormon Lecture, and laughed as hilariously as any one in the room. The next evening Mr. John Bright happened to be present. With the exception of one or two occasional smiles, he listened with grave attention. In placing the lecture before the public in print, it is impossible, by having recourse to any system of punctuation, to indicate the pauses, jerky emphases, and odd inflexions of voice which characterised the delivery. The reporter of the Standard newspaper, describing his first lecture in London, aptly said: "Artemus dropped his jokes faster than the meteors of last night succeeded each other in the sky. And there was this resemblance between the flashes of his humour and the flights of the meteors, that in each case one looked for jokes or meteors, but they always came just in the place that one least expected to find them. Half the enjoyment of the evening lay, to some of those present, in listening to the hearty cachinnation of the people who only found out the jokes some two or three minutes after they were made, and who then laughed apparently at some grave statements of fact. Reduced to paper, the showman's jokes are certainly not brilliant; almost their whole effect lies in their seemingly impromptu character. They are carefully led up to, of course; but they are uttered as if they are mere afterthoughts, of which the speaker is hardly sure." Herein the writer in the Standard hits the most marked peculiarity of Artemus Ward's style of lecturing. His affectation of not knowing what he was uttering, his seeming fits of abstraction, and his grave, melancholy aspect, constituted the very cream of the entertainment. Occasionally he would amuse himself in an apparently meditative mood, by twirling his little riding-whip, or by gazing earnestly, but with affected admiration, at his panorama. At the Egyptian Hall his health entirely failed him, and he would occasionally have to use a seat during the course of the lecture. In the notes which follow I have tried, I know how inefficiently, to convey here and there an idea of how Artemus rendered his lecture amusing by gesture or action. I have also, at the request of the publisher, made a few explanatory comments on the subject of our Mormon trip. In so doing I hope that