A SUGGESTION
We have been looking over the catalogue of Coventry Patmore’s library, issued by Everard Meynell at “The Serendipity Shop,” London. The following note interested us; some of our vigorous readers, now that the wooing season is toward, may find in it a gentle technical hint:
Patmore told Dr. Garnett that during his courtship, wishing to be sure that a congeniality of taste existed between himself and Emily Andrews, he lent her Emerson’s Essays, asking her to mark the passages that most struck her, and on getting the book back was delighted to find that the marks were those which he would have made for himself.
According to Mr. Meynell’s catalogue, the copy of Emerson referred to is inscribed, in Patmore’s hand: “Emily Andrews, June 24, 1847.” Emerson’s efficacy in the rôle of Cupid may be judged from the fact that the two were married September 11, 1847.
One wonders if Patmore applied the same test before his two subsequent marriages (1864, 1881).
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ADVICE TO YOUNG WRITERS
A gentleman asks us to give some advice to young men intending to enter journalism. Well, we would say, get a job as a sporting writer. That is where the real fun lies. Being a sporting writer is hot stuff; it keeps you out in the open air, you are respected and even admired by the least easily impressionable classes, such as policemen, car conductors, and office boys; you have immense fun inventing new ways of saying things (which is the groundwork of good literature), get a great many free meals, have your expenses paid, meet people who have high-powered cars and put them at your disposal, and your lightest word is deemed important enough to be put on a telegraph wire and flashed to the office for an Extra. If you write about such minor matters as war and peace, poetry, books, or the beauty of this, that, and the other, you will be hidden demurely away on an inside page and there is no particular hurry about it.
The other day at the Polo Grounds we noticed a hard-boiled fan leaving the stand after the game. As he passed out onto the field he suddenly saw the gang of reporters finishing up their stories and the instruments clattering beside them. “Gee,” he cried, “look at all the writers!” And with a real awe he turned to his companion and said: “Their stuff goes all over the world.”
We contend that Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, James Branch Cabell, Joe Hergesheimer, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and Lord Dunsany, sitting side by side on a bench writing short stories for a wager, would not have elicited such a gust of reverent admiration from our friend.