Untitled

Thames Star, Volume VI, Issue 1861, 19 December 1874, Page 3

The Intelligent Compositor.—This is Max Adeler's dedication to his new book, •Out of the Hurley Burly:'—"My original intention was to dedicate this book to the friend of my boyhood, Azgn ben Ghes, the Iniaum of Muscat, in Jnemory of the happy days when together we played marbles in the Oman desert, and ducked each, other in the [Persian Gulf, and "tortured inoffensive cats on the Island of Kishin. But I have .changed my mind; I have resolved to dedicate the book to a humorist who has had too little to the most delicious, because the most unconscious humorist, to that widely scattered and multitudinous comedian who may be expressed in the concrete as the intelligent compositor. To his faculty of perpetrating felicitous absurdities J am indebted for ' laughter that is worth a hundred groans." It was he who, putting into type an article of mine which .jeo: tamed the injunction, 'Do. npt cast your pearls before swine,' .transformed,., the phrase into, * Do not cart your pills before sunrise.' It was he who caused me to quote the poet's inquiry so that I propounded to the world the appalling conundrum, 'Where are the dead, the vanished dead P ' And it was his glorious tendency, to make the sublime the convulsively ridiculous that rejected a line "in '.'k poem of^ae which declared that a' comet swept o'er the heavens with its trailling skirts,' and substituted the idea that a ' count slept in a hayincw in a travelling skirt.' . This kind, of talent that is here displayed deserves profound reference. It is wonderful and awful, and thus, I offer it as a to ten of my marvelling respect."