On takin the secund glass I was seezed with a desire to break winders, & arter imbibin the third glass I knockt a small boy down, pickt his pocket of a New York _Ledger_, and wildly commenced readin Sylvanus Kobb's last Tail.
He is still read and still republished. There is a perennial charm about his work that raises it above the times that produced it, and that promises to make it permanent. His originality, his unfailing animal spirits which came of the abounding life of the new America, his quaint characterization which has added a new figure to the gallery of fiction, his Americanism, his vein of kindliness and pathos that underlies all that he wrote, his indignation at snobbery and all in the life of his day that was not genuine and pure, and finally the exquisite pathos of his later years, all combine to make him remembered.
Among the literary progeny of "Artemus Ward" the most noteworthy, perhaps, was "Petroleum V. Nasby," who became so familiar a figure during the war. The creator of this unique character was David Ross Locke, a native of the State of New York, and, like Browne, a wandering printer from early boyhood. When the "Artemus Ward" letters began to appear in the Cleveland _Plain-Dealer_, Locke was editor of the Bucyrus _Journal_, a few miles to the westward. Their success spurred him to imitation, but it was not until the firing upon Fort Sumter that he succeeded at all in attracting attention. Wingert's Corners, a small hamlet in Crawford County, Ohio, had petitioned the legislature to remove all negroes from the State. There was a humorous element in such a proposition from such a source. Why not give the bellicose little community an appropriate spokesman, a sort of "copperhead" "Artemus Ward," and have him declare it totally free and independent of the State? The result was a letter in the Findlay _Jeffersonian_, of which Locke was then the editor, dated "Wingert's Corners, March the 21, 1861," and signed "Petroleum V. Nasby." The "Nasby Letters" had begun. The little Ohio hamlet soon proved too small a field for the redoubtable Democrat, and to give free play to his love of slavery and untaxed whisky, his hatred of "niggers" and his self-seeking disloyalty, he was removed to "Confedrit X Roads (wich is in the Stait of Kentucky)," from which imaginary center letters continued to flow during the war and the reconstruction era that followed.