DUNEDIN NOTES.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4923, 8 January 1902, Page 3

DUNEDIN NOTES.

[Own Cobbespondent.] Mr Wilson Barrett is, probably, the best advertised man in bis profession to-day. He has many superiors as an actor, yet no actor, with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is so well known, to the general and indiscriminating public ; whilst as a dramatist there are at least a dozen men who can walk round aud round him. Yet Mr Barrett comes into Dunedin with a greater flourish of trumpets than Sir Hector Macdonald, Santley, the king of baritones; Ketten, the prince of pianists ; Forbes, the monarch of war correspondents ; • Trebelli, Newbury, or Foli, or many another artist of world wide repiUe in their own line of bnsinegs. Onr ] worthy Mayor turns out to meet him-, so do many of the clergy and a mixture of nobodies, and the Press give him columns of free advertising and talk generally as though Mr Barrett were the greatest and most wonderful " actor and author " the New Zealand folkß had ever seen.

Mark, too, the difference in treatment. Mr Newbury, a tbnor singer of high rank, and a man who has held his own side by side with the great singers of the day, is a Dunedin lad, born among us, trained and educated in our midst, yet when he comes t ack to his native city no Mayor nor clergy turn out to meet him, nor do the public, at Is a head, flock to hear him, we simply stay away and save our money to go and see the " greatest living actor and author " at 5s a piece.

And those papers ! As a humble member of the craft I lodge my protest against the ignorant effusions, the slops and slobber and uncritical gush that is made to pass muster for calm, intelligent, impartial criticism. Such screeds cannot be accepted as a compliment by the players, whilst to ihe normal man they are beyond measure repulsive. lYom a column of small type rubbish I select the following as a fair type of what I mean. «' When an artist's great reputation precedes him there are those who are carried on the wings of an irresistible imagination to the seventh heaven of expectation, bat after their drenrns assume a more tangible shapo their time is folly occupied in the restoration of the* disjecta membra of their own ideals.' How is that for unmitigated balderdash P And there are whole baskets full of it. If Mr Barrett has* any sense of humor or selfrespect he must turn in loathing from such dollops of unthinking, unintelligible, slap-dash verbose nothings. It is- as though a man had a bucket of words beside him, from whioh he takes whatever comes first to band and flings into lines of writing in utter ignorance of their sense or meaning. However, the Barrett boom is on and we must make the best' of it.

We are maintaining onr reputation for assaults and robbery with violence. On Christmas Eve we had five of these. Decent people were held up at the point of the fist or boot and compelled to band over their belongings, failing compliance they received a knock down and a kick. One lady, however, decidedly objected to " hand over " quietly, bnt responded with a vigorous and, I am pleased to say, successful application of umbrella. I notice that the police pooh-pooh these facts. Poor police } How many things have they poohpoohed within the last twelve months whioh have afterwards turned out to be history? What about the St. Clair outrage? What about the numerous burglaries f What abont cases of suicide? On enquiry at headquarters the police have uno information," or they " had nothing to disolose," or " in the interests of justice things had better not be mentioned," etc, etc So that when the police say they know nothing about assaults and " hold-ups " in our streets at night that is not, as far as I am concerned, sufficient. I cannot admit that because a man is a policeman that he, necessarily, knows more about what is going on in town than a man who is not. Anyway I believe in most of the robberies.

Our Oity fathers will resume their idle chatter in public next week. Meantime the question of tramways is just where it has been any time during the last ten years. We are still living under the horse car regime, and I never venture in them save in case of absolute necessity, but sufficient can be gathered from the numbers who do make use of them, even now, to indicate what a splendid revenue-producing concern the city will have when (when?) the electric car service is installed, 1 again repeat my belief that the City will not construct its own service, but that tenders will b,e called as originally intended.

Mayor Dennifiton, unlike many of his predecessors, is a modest man. He does not hope to enter the land of Cauaan, which for D,unedin means a land of new water supply, adequate drainage plant, electric oars and decent streets, during his term of office, but will be quite content if he can enforce the by-laws dealing with street expectoration and orange peel on the pavement. This, I think, ia all. Not a very high ideal truly, but many a man has gained immortality for doing much less for the benefit of his fellows. May his modest desires be crowned with glory. There is no such thing as mining news these times. One opens the paper and where of old from two to five columns of small type stuff on dredging and pumps, and liquidations, and angry recriminations met the eye — varied with long columns of often incorrectly added returns from lucky dredges — one finds nothing more harmless than a piece of literary effort devoted to the moral, physical and spiritual advantages to be derived from using three times a day for ten years a box of Billy Deans' pills or a bottle of Mother Seagull's Irritating Syrup. In other words we are in the heart of the big gooseberry and early green pea season.

I expect, thoujarh, that mining will assume, and continue to wear, a muoh healthier garb than of yore in the near future. We are knocking down and bowling over all those companies whose rtght to be called gold dredging ones was from the start seriously open to question. Where many of these conoerna made a mistake was in not first offering their dredges to the Otago Harbor Board. They might, at least, have made wages in the useful task of cleaning up the channel. Once, however, these and their kind are out of the way for good and all, and every claim that \a a claim. \s standing on its own bottom and working on its own earnings, then the industry will become what we all think it can and will become, one of the most profitable investments and staple products of the colony. Meanwhile we must pay our calls, write off our bad debts and try to look pleasant. That, at all events, is what I am trying, With occasional flashes of success, to do myself and example is said to be of greater value than precept,