Comes a courting—therefore,
Hey, willow waly O!
* * * * *
* * * * *
When The Times had some pretensions to the title of the leading English newspaper, it was known as “The Thunderer of Printing House Square,” but it has recently been re-christened The Blunderer; or, the Political Weathercock, a name which recalls the subsidiary titles Mr. Gilbert gives to all his operas. The silly misprints, and other errors, which are to be found daily in The Times show the careless manner in which it is edited, whilst several disgraceful hoaxes practised upon it by the compositors on its staff, prove how unpopular the management must have been, and that a chronic state of mutiny existed in Printing House Square. One of these practical jokes was perpetrated on The Times by an audacious compositor, who altered an advertisement which appeared on Tuesday, February 21, 1882, so that it read:—On the 20th instant, at — Park Lane, W., the wife of Albert Edward, of a son.” Whilst a still worse hoax appeared in The Times of Monday, June 12, 1882, in an advertisement of a book entitled Every-Day Life in our Public Schools, which title was amplified in a manner never contemplated by the editor.
But the grossest case of all was that contained in the report of a speech delivered at Burton-on-Trent by Sir William Vernon Harcourt, then Home Secretary. This speech was reported at length in The Times of Monday, January 23, 1882, and thousands of copies were sold before the infallible authorities found out that the pompous Sir W. V. Harcourt’s speech had been adorned, by their compositors, with flowers of speech of a very unclassical nature. Every effort was then made to call in the unsold copies, but the mischief was done, and for weeks The Times was the laughing stock of London, and fabulous prices were given for copies containing the objectionable paragraph.
Duet.
Mr. Gladstone, and Sir W. Vernon Harcourt.
Mr. Gladstone—
Prithee, Vernon Harcourt, prithee tell me true