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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 1
[trade dispatches]
Few of our exchanges exhibit better presswork than the little Lyell Times. To those who remember the old Lyell Argus, no more striking example of the progress of the district could be adduced.
From La Typologie-Tucker we learn that a new typographic journal has been started at Abbeville, entitled La Compositrice. Its object is to defend the professional interests and to unite in one body the small groups of compositresses scattered over France. It is edited by Mlle Jeanne Daussy.
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The Jubilee Herald of 20th Aug. is just to hand. It is much better printed than No. 1; but on very bad paper. News is still conspicuously deficient, the columns being filled apparently from school reading-books and old scrap-books chiefly. It contains five poems, one being a revised version of part of the well-known « Pilgrim Fathers. » It begins « The sullen waves beat high » and another line is « The wealth of seas?—the sports of war? » It is simple desecration thus to mangle English literature. Of the six stanzas printed, four have been tampered with, and we are glad to see that the editor appreciates his own share in the poem so well that he has not put Mrs Hemans's name to it. To have done so would have been to libel the dead. The gem of the paper is an original poem by Mr Pat. MacCarthy, entitled « A Tragedy, Bodghe Jail, June, 1887. » We quote it as it stands:
'Twas moonlight, and the soft rays fell
On a dark form imprisoned there.
A slave lay in a prison cell,
And breathed the dark pestiferous air.
His breathing low and soft fell on
My ear attentive at the door;
In one hand I a dagger held,
In t'other hand a saw.
A blow, a shot, a stab, a rush,
And all was silence there,
The victim of the Landlord curse
Had vanished into air.
And there was rain, a murky mist,
And pestilence and buryin',
But the proudest man who slept that night
Was that poor son of Erin.
Here is a stupendous enigma. The only thing apparent is that Patrick perpetrated a very cowardly deed. Armed to the teeth—a pistol in his belt, a saw (an ugly weapon) in one hand and a dagger in the other—he enters the cell, first making sure that his intended victim is sound asleep. Not content with using the three murderous weapons, he literally annihilates the prisoner with « the Landlord curse »—a form of imprecation evidently more potent than dynamite. The corpse having disappeared, the pestilence and buryin' remain to be accounted for; and it is by no means clear who the proud sleeper was—the assassin or his victim—or what cause either of them had for pride. We give it up.—Is the J. H. nothing more than a huge (double-) Royal Jubilee Joke?