Old lecture days in Boston(wirtten in 1898)

I remember Petroleum¹ Vesuvius Nasby (Locke) very well. When the Civil War began he was on the staff of the Toledo Blade, an old and prosperous and popular weekly newspaper. He let fly a Nasby letter and it made a fine strike. He was famous at once. He followed up his new lead, and gave the Copperheads and the Democratic party a most admirable hammering every week, and his letters were copied everywhere, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and read and laughed over by everybody--at least everybody except particularly dull and prejudiced Democrats² and Copperheads. For suddenness, Nasby's fame was an explosion; for universality it was atmospheric³. He was soon offered a company; he accepted and was straightway ready to leave for the front; but the Governor of the state was a wiser man than were the political masters of K?rner and Pet?fi; for he refused to sign Nasby's commission and ordered him to stay at home. He said that in the field Nasby would be only one soldier, handling one sword, but at home with his pen he was an army--with artillery⁴! Nasby obeyed and went on writing his electric letters.
I saw him first when I was on a visit to Hartford; I think it was three or four years after the war. The Opera House was packed and jammed with people to hear him deliver his lecture on "Cussed be Canaan." He had been on the platform with that same lecture--and no other--during two or three years, and it had passed his lips several hundred times, yet even now he could not deliver any sentence of it without his manuscript--except the opening one. His appearance on the stage was welcomed with a prodigious⁵ burst of applause, but he did not stop to bow or in any other way acknowledge the greeting, but strode straight to the reading desk, spread his portfolio⁶ open upon it, and immediately petrified⁷ himself into an attitude which he never changed during the hour and a half occupied by his performance, except to turn his leaves--his body

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