POETRY OF FACT.
At the festive season of the year particularly, people commonly complain that the newspapers are dull. Unless in exceptional years, nothing happens of which the narration is in anywise interesting, and the dearth of news is generally so extreme that journalists are actually driven to fill their columns with theological controversies.
The dryness of grammatical details has been surmounted by the device of putting them into metre, as in the As in Præsenti and the Propria quæ Maribus of the Eton Latin Grammar. Might not the contents of the Journals, in like sort, be rendered somewhat less prosy than they sometimes are by being versified? The telegrams would, perhaps, be peculiarly susceptible of this treatment, whereunto they seem to lend themselves in virtue of their characteristic conciseness, which it would enhance. The electric wire on New Year's Day transmitted a certain message from Rome. Here it is in the form of blank verse:—
The King to-day received the Ministers.
The Deputations Parliamentary,
The State's great Officers, the military
And the municipal authorities,
And other delegates. His Majesty
Thanks for congratulations did return
To those who tendered them, occasionally,