The last picture I have to show you represents Mr. Brigham Young in the bosom of his family. His family is large—and the olive branches around his table are in a very tangled condition. He is more a father than any man I know. When at home—as you here see him—he ought to be very happy with sixty wives to minister to his comforts—and twice sixty children to soothe his distracted mind. Ah! my friends— what is home without a family?
What will become of Mormonism? We all know and admit it to be a hideous wrong—a great immoral strain upon the 'scutcheon of the United States. My belief is that its existence is dependent upon the life of Brigham Young. His administrative ability holds the system together—his power of will maintains it as the faith of a community. When he dies—Mormonism will die too. The men who are around him have neither his talent nor his energy. By means of his strength it is held together. When he falls—Mormonism will also fall to pieces.
That lion—you perceive—has a tail. It is a long one already. Like mine—it is to be continued in our next.
(Reprise of first picture of curtain and footlights.
The curtain fell for the last time on Wednesday, the 23d of January 1867. Artemus Ward had to break off the lecture abruptly. He never lectured again.)
6.3. "THE TIMES" NOTICE.
"EGYPTIAN HALL.—Before a large audience, comprising an extraordinary number of literary celebrities, Mr. Artemus Ward, the noted American humorist, made his first appearance as a public lecturer on Tuesday evening, the place selected for the display of his quaint oratory being the room long tenanted by Mr. Arthur Sketchley. His first entrance on the platform was the signal for loud and continuous laughter and applause, denoting a degree of expectation which a nervous man might have feared to encounter. However, his first sentences, and the way in which they were received, amply sufficed to prove that his success was certain. The dialect of Artemus bears a less evident mark of the Western World than that of many American actors, who would fain merge their own peculiarities in the delineation of English character; but his jokes are of that true Transatlantic type, to which no nation beyond the limits of the States can offer any parallel. These jokes he lets fall with an air of profound unconsciousness—we may almost say melancholy— which is irresistibly droll, aided as it is by the effect of a figure singularly gaunt and lean and a face to match. And he has found an audience by whom his caustic humor is thoroughly appreciated. Not one of the odd pleasantries slipped out with such imperturbable gravity misses its mark, and scarcely a minute elapses at the end of which the sedate Artemus is not forced to pause till the roar of mirth has subsided. There is certainly this foundation for an entente cordiale between the two countries calling themselves Anglo- Saxon, that the Englishman, puzzled by Yankee politics, thoroughly relishes Yankee jokes, though they are not in the least like his own. When two persons laugh together, they cannot hate each other much so long as the laugh continues.
"The subject of Artemus Ward's lecture is a visit to the Mormons, copiously illustrated by a series of moving pictures, not much to be commended as works of art, but for the most part well enough executed to give (fidelity granted) a notion of life as it is among the remarkable inhabitants of Utah. Nor let the connoisseur, who detects the shortcomings of some of these pictures, fancy that he has discovered a flaw in the armor of the doughty Artemus. That astute gentleman knows their worth as well as anybody else, and while he ostensibly extols them, as a showman is bound to do, he every now and then holds them up to ridicule in a vein of the deepest irony. In one case a palpable error of perspective, by which a man is made equal in size to a mountain, has been purposely committed, and the shouts of laughter that arise as soon as the ridiculous picture appears is tremendous. But there is no mirth in the face of Artemus; he seems even deaf to the roar; and when he proceeds to the explanation of the landscape, he touches on the ridiculous point in a slurring way that provokes a new explosion.
"The particulars of the lecture we need not describe. Many accounts of the Mormons, more or less credible, and all authenticated, have been given by serious historians, and Mr. W.H. Dixon, who has just returned from Utah to London, is said to have brought with him new stores of solid information. But to most of us Mormonism is still a mystery, and under those circumstances a lecturer who has professedly visited a country for the sake more of picking up fun than of sifting facts, and whose chief object it must be to make his narrative amusing, can scarcely be accepted as an authority. We will, therefore, content ourselves with stating that the lecture is entertaining to such a degree that to those who seek amusement its brevity is its only fault; that it is utterly free from offence, though the opportunities for offence given by the subject of Mormonism are obviously numerous; that it is interspersed, not only with irresistible jokes, but with shrewd remarks, proving that Artemus Ward is a man of reflection, as well as a consummate humorist."