PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 7890, 4 June 1887, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

(From Otago Witness.)

We are in the throes of a political crisis— that is to say, of a revolution, —but have learned to make revolutions with rosewater. There will be no howling mobs, no barricades, no bloodshed. The Premier about to be deposed is even on terms of reasonable cordiality with the leader of the successful revolt. There has been no " Off with his head! So much for Atkinson !" The party coming in will wreak no vengeance on the party going out. Mr Ballances will not he impeached, nor the blue blood of the Vogels attainted; Mr Reynolds will not be sent to the Tower (Mount Cook prison), nor will Sir Robert Stout be relegated in honourable, exile to a bishopric for which pbst of usefulness I have often thought him eminently fitted. Amongst our remote forefathers something like this might have happened. Other times, other manners. As it is, all the parties, to the struggle for place, power, and pay which resulted the other night in the defeat of the Ministry, seem equally well pleased with the result. At least so says the Daily Times correspondent, and the statement seems not a little surprising. That the Opposition should rejoice over their rictory is intelligible, but why should the Government be made jubilant by their own discomfiture? "Most of ther members of the Ministry," says the correspondent, " were, to all appearance, delighted with their defeat; the Premier seems especially light-hearted overit."; There may be something of makebelieve in this, but it is not all make-believe. There is; no evidence that the members of this Ministry were all and each passionately attached to one another. The Stout-Vogel union was scarcely a case of " two souls with but a, single thought, two hearts that beat as one." The motley and heterogeneous political firm that went under that name transgressed in more than one instance the Scriptural command, " Thou shalt not yoke an ox and an ass together." These facts, perhaps, serve to explain the otherwise inexplicable and all but indecent joy of the Ministry—or some of them—orer their own defeat, 'it is pleasing at any rate to think that they are pleased, : for the Opposition is pleased, and the country is pleased, and we are pleased, and thus there is a delightful diffusion of pleasure all around, or, as somebody puts it in the "Mikado"— * y And they are right, And you are right, And we are right, And all is right, as right can be.

Mr Joseph Braithwaite, the enterprising Princes street bookseller, was at one time a pillar of the Dunedin Lyceum. In his quality \of pillar he presided at its assemblies, compiled or helped Sir Robert Stout to compile its memorable "Guide" edited its " Echo." Mr Braithwaite, who is now a pillar of orthodoxy, will not, I am sure, take ill the mention of these historic and biographic details. He has this week drawn attention to them himself. In a letter addressedto the Star—a letter a column longhe drives the knife between tbe ribs of Freethought with an accuracy of aim which can be explained only by an ancient and intimate acquaintance with the victim's anatomy. Nobody but an ex-Lyceumite could have gone so: straight for a vulnerable spot, or "got home "so well. If Mr Braithwaite will only keep it up, and the Star or some other paper gives Kirn space, we may look for some fun. Times have been dull with the Lyceumites of late. Nobody attacks them, nobody laughs at them, nobody knows or cares to know anything about them. ' Their ritualistic gambols —slapping the breast with the left foot, and the like (vide " Guide ">—have ceased to amuse, their ecclesiastical nihilism has ceased to alarm. One of their presidents, Mr Braithwaite, has been converted to Christianity, and about another, Sir Robert Stout, there Have been great searchings of heart. : For is not Sir Robert turning out a Demas, who loves this present world? Altogether things are pretty low at the Lyceum just now, and greatly need a fillip. That fillip Mr Braithwaite seems to have been predestinated to give. An attack by a former president turned orthodox should be enough ito galvanise every fainting believer in the;gospel of unbelief into spasms, of furious:activity. But for this intervention their hall might soon have been let to the Salvation Army.

There is & good deal of frankness about a paragraph in the Auckland Bell, commenting on an incident during the recent visit of a French man-of-war. The band of the visitors' played for the public entertainment in Albert ; Park. At the strains of the "Marseillaise" every Frenchman uncovered but, says the Bell, "not a pig of us had the courtesy to do the same." The English National Anthem-followed, when again the visitors; lifted their hats; not so their hosts. Natives of foggy Britain, and too familiar with colds in the head, they grinned, shuffled about, looked uncomfortable, but remained covered. Says the Bell, commenting on this :* "As a nation we have many good and estimable qualities we know; but ia manners we are swine." The editor's indignation is not unjust, but the terms in which he expresses it are too comprehensive. There is a story of Dr Parr, a once famous head-master, and a ;still celebrated Grecian. A young whippersnapper, fresh from his university, had the impertinence to condole with Dr Parr on the decay of Greek scholarship. "Don't you think, sir," said he, "that we are far inferior to the Greek scholars of the past ? " " We," snarled the erudite but testy doctor; "mind your pronouns, sir, mind your pronouns! " I offer the same advice to the editor of the Bell. He says that" in manners we are swine," and that " not a pig of us " knows the decencies of civilised life. Let him mind his pronouns, and speak for himself and his Auckland neighbours.

Mr Dugald Ferguson's angry protest against the mishandling he received in the Daily Times review of his book raises in a new form the protection to native industries question. •• I write bad English, do I ?"—retorts Mr Ferguson to his critic. " Well, why shouldn't I ? I am a colonist, and as such am entitled to write bad English." This is a new style of defence, —new with a vengeance, since, if this be allowed, the literary critic is clearly de trop, and may lay down his tools and join himself unto the unemployed. Othello's occupation's gone. That is an evil under which Mr Dugald Ferguson, no doubt, might be consoled. Not so easily, however, would the public be consoled. The literary critic, be it understood, exists ifor the publio and not for the Dugald Fergusons. But let us hear this modest writer's opinion on the rights of native authorship in his own words :—

Pray, Sir, where does the reproach come in that I should be found so deficient in grammar whose life since a youth has been cast among tho most uncongenial scenes and surroundings of Australian and New Zealand farms—scenes in which opportunities for reacquiring forgotten lessons of school studies were singularly lacking ? Is such an experience as that a fitting opportunity, think you, Sir, for you to herald to the public your own mighty acumen and critical ability in the hunting-out and holding-up faults for public derision that a more gentlemanly spirit might well have taught you rather to hare made allowance for ?

Here we are told that a bush author is to be excused in writing ungramrnatical sentences because his life has been "cast in uncongenial scenes," and that reviewers are fco be restrained from pointing out his faults by a "gentlemanly qidrft." Protection to native industry, you>^rceive. Literary bush-carpentry, if native to the soil, is to be protected against criticism. It won't do, Mr Ferguson 1 Where is the necessity, prithee, that a man who can't make grammatical sentences should write a book at all ? It is the old case: Nee satis apparet cur factitet versus.

Some praise is due to the colonial youth ambitious of authorship who fails either in prose or verse-praise for the attempt. But that he should be praised for the failure, mn-JET encoul aged silence, is too much to ask. Nevertheless Mr Ferguson, Kn^fi6^ 61 tWs cla «s, is entitled rtPn, Si °^ lS CrifciCS> andto delu&e them with opprobrious epithets, if that is any comfort to him. There are extremities

The ripples of that teacup storm; designated "a Ministerial crisis," have filled the columns of our daily papers " to the exclusion of other matter," as a well-known phrase m -nSV } this phrase upon examination will be discovered to be incorrect. There seems; as luck will have it, to be no other matter to exclude. Since the session commenced Dunedin has been without even a dog fight to reli3ve its dullness, excepting alwayi the oration of Sir George Grey upon the hard brass of the Burns Statue and the relaxing symposium that followed it The only incident at all in the nature of a local sensation is the revelation (at wearisome length, to be sure) of the ferocity of the gas engineer. This affair has once more | split the City Council into two sections each comprising six^ panting partisans. It has led to the hurried resuscitation of the supposedly extinct Ratepayers' Association, and has cast a transient halo of fame about the portly person of Mr D. A. Graham. As a man who merely made cheap gas he was silently appreciated, but achieved little popular ; distinction. As a man who imperils, public business by behaving with want of polish towards the secretary of the town offices (gas department), who compels clerks to make "bee-lines" for back doors, and who writes well-argued defences embellished with genuine touches of humour, he is likely to become a' hero, like—let. us say Boulanger or Mr H S Fish. Whatever the merits of this case may be when laboriously "panned out" by the City Council there has been plenty already to afford wholesome diversion to the public. In fact, it is doubtful if the public are not well satisfied with the thing as it is and would not join heartily in presenting testimonials to all three belligerents—Messrs Graham, Taylor, and Griffen. Do not the first and the last named gentlemen—the engineer' and his clerk-at least deserve thanks for their contribution towards the public entertainment. Mr Griffen appeals for protection from the " brutal and outrageous " conduct 'of his superior, of whom he stands in bodily fear, and before whose " fiendish " visage he has been forced to make a "beeline for the back door." Of this episode 'Mr Graham gives a really delicious narrative divested, he claims, of "imagery, hyperbole or superfluous embellishments." Here is an extract:— ■ .

J said, "Mr Griffen, after this I should feel; obliged if you would first knock at the door before rushing into my house." I then rose and went out into the passage; but he made, a retreat, and began to execute the "bee-line" It is untrue that I said, " Go out of my house," as both my wife and servant can testify. Nor is it true that I " roared at the top of my voice " • nor is it true that "lopened the door," for the day washotand the room door wasopen; nor is it true that Mr Griffen made "abee-line for the back door —his imagination supplied the place of sober sense when he insinuates " I was coming towards :him" with "I imagine something in my hand"; nor is it true, as my servant and my wife can prove, that he could. possibly have seen "the fiendish look in my face." Apart from the witnesses I can bring forward to prove that Mr Griffen has borne false witness against me, I would ask: Is it reasonable to suppose that while Mr Griffen•»•was in a state of bodily fear." and was in the act of executing " the bee-lme,?' "coming down, the stairs much quicker than I went up," is it at all likely he would, under such circumstances, like Lot's wife, turn to have an " imagined " ldok at the wrath to come ? • ■ ...........

Mr Graham, it will be perceived, can do other things besides making gas. ■ He may possibly, if he finds leisure in the future, give me occasional assistance with Passing Notes. As-to the veracity of either party in respect to the scene here, recounted, obviously the only way in which that can be definitely settled is to have a dress rehearsal in the presence of both parties of the City Council, the Corporation solicitors/and say, Mr W. L. Simpson as referee. Let Mr Griffen be placed again; in his position in bodily fear, and let Mr Graham be also placed in Ms with the fiendish look firmly fixed. Then let Mr Griffen re-execute his bee line, and let the tribunal watch developments and take cotes.

Much: excellent fun is occasionally got out of examination papers—not by the examinees, certainly, but by the examiners, whose questions sometimes seem contrived with a view to humorous effects, and by the public when judicious examples from the answers get by any chance into the newspapers. Mark Twain has recently supplied—possibly out of his own fertile brain—an American list of examination paper comicalities, which I am bound to say, teat all English attempts in the same line, out of the field. ■■ The Mark Twain list willjgo the round of the papers, no doubt, but that fact need not deter me from using some pickings out of it to enrich my Passing Notes. ;Here are a few plums specially selected by the &t. James' Budget:— A future citizen of the United; States can apparently (-define a Republican as "a sinner mentioned in; the Bible," and a demagogne as "a vessel containing beer and other liquids." Of the mathematical samples we prefer the ingenious definition of a circle as "a round straight line 'with a hole in the middle," of the geographical, the assertions that " Russia is very cold and tyranmical," and that" Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle becauseiit is so beautiful and green." The pearls of history are numerous and precious— e-ff-t " by the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the throne," and " the Middle Ages came in between antiquity and posterity." As a specimen of literary history, take the statement that "Georgs Eliot left a <wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius."* The science of " Physillogigy is to study about your bones, stummick, and vertebry." It teaches, for instance, that" the gastric juice keepsithe bones from creaking." It must be added that the questions of i the examiners are sometimes almost as foolish as the answers they elicit.

Civis.