In the other departments of the magazine will be found
poetry, tales, and other frothy trifles, and to these
the reader can turn for relaxation from time to time,
and thus guard against overstraining the powers of
his mind.
M.
T.
P. S.—1. I have not sold out of the
“Buffalo Express,” and shall not; neither
shall I stop writing for it. This remark seems
necessary in a business point of view.
2. These memoranda are not a “humorous”
department. I would not conduct an exclusively
and professedly humorous department for any one.
I would always prefer to have the privilege of printing
a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred
to me, without the reader’s feeling obliged
to consider himself outraged. We cannot keep
the same mood day after day. I am liable, some
day, to want to print my opinion on jurisprudence,
or Homeric poetry, or international law, and I shall
do it. It will be of small consequence to me
whether the reader survive or not. I shall never
go straining after jokes when in a cheerless mood,
so long as the unhackneyed subject of international
law is open to me. I will leave all that straining
to people who edit professedly and inexorably “humorous”
departments and publications.
3. I have chosen the general title of memoranda
for this department because it is plain and simple,
and makes no fraudulent promises. I can print
under it statistics, hotel arrivals, or anything that
comes handy, without violating faith with the reader.
4. Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department.
Inoffensive ignorance, benignant stupidity, and unostentatious
imbecility will always be welcomed and cheerfully
accorded a corner, and even the feeblest humour will
be admitted, when we can do no better; but no circumstances,
however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient
excuse for the admission of that last—and
saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the Pun.
In a recent issue of the “Independent,”
the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, of Brooklyn, has the
following utterance on the subject of “Smells”:
I have a good Christian friend who,
if he sat in the front pew in church, and a working
man should enter the door at the other end, would
smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame
for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than
you would flog a pointer for being keener on
the scent than a stupid watch dog. The fact is,
if you, had all the churches free, by reason of
the mixing up of the common people with the uncommon,
you would keep one-half of Christendom sick at
their stomach. If you are going to kill the
church thus with bad smells, I will have nothing
to do with this work of evangelization.
We have reason to believe that there will be labouring
men in heaven; and also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux,
