The printer does not seem to be deeply concerned about his future, indeed, he has many a gay dig at that grave subject; as, for instance—
Old Lucifer, both kind and civil.
To every printer lends a devil;
But, balancing accounts each winter,
For every devil takes a printer.
AUTHOR’S MISERIES.
Having corresponded with Miss Rudge, the gifted poetess (authoress of “Floranthe,” “The Lovelock of Montrose,” “Moans of the Heartstrings,” etc.), and exchanged portraits and your own poems with her, you meet at last.
You are disappointed in her appearance and find her about forty years older than her picture; perhaps you, too, have grown rather fat and seedy since yours was taken twenty years ago.
The printer’s “devil,” by the way, is a queer fish, and there is a story about a certain metropolitan imp that fits any of the little sinners to a T. This particular youngster had just received his week’s wages, eleven shillings, when he was heard to soliloquize in these terms—“Let me see. I’ll go the Coliseum to-night, that’s a shilling; supper with bottled beer, that’s eighteenpence; ’baccy for the week, a shilling; beer ditto, two shillings; theatre one night next week, that’s one-and-six, and supper, one-and-six; and I’ll buy that swell walking stick, and that’ll just leave sixpence to take home to mother towards my week’s board.” He must have been a regular bad ’un, that.
Another favourite medium of printing-house fun is found in adapting Gilbert’s famous line and mourning that a “printer’s lot is not a happy one,” or magnifying the annoyances from authors and editors with which printers have to put up. In this connexion we find one printer relieving his troubled soul thus—
Working for forty editors and scores of authors, every one of whom is as sensitive as a sore thumb, and as lively and interesting as a hornet, no wonder that printers die young, and only pachydermatus, grizzly, mulish specimens get their share of life. The writer wishes he could offer himself as an awful example of the perils which environ a man who meddles with cold type. A thoroughly trained printer should have had a stepmother, and then a stepfather, and then have been bound out to a tanner, and then have married a scolding wife, and lived in a smoky house, and have had a family of babies who were afflicted with colic. He should have added to all this discipline a thorough knowledge of science, art, law, language, theology, history and biography. If, in addition, he has a vicious looking countenance and an amiable disposition, he may stand some chance with these authors and editors ; but the probabilities are, after all, that they will worry him to death.
