THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue XXVI, 29 July 1871, Page 3

THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE.

" Mark Twain" writes as follows in the " Galaxy" :— When ] get old and ponderously respectable, only one thing will be able to make me truly happy, and that will be to be put on the venerable Tone-Imparting Committee of the city of New York, and have nothing to do but to sit on the platform, solemn, and imposing, along with Peter Cooper, Horace Greely, &c, and shed momentary fame at second-hand on obscure lecturers, draw public attention to lectures which would otherwise clack eloquently to sounding emptiness, and subdue audiences into respectful bearing of all sorts of unpopular and outlandish dogma and isms. That is what I desire for the cheer and gratification of my grey hairs. Let me but sit up there with those fine relics of the Old Red Sandstone period, and give tone to an intellectual entertainment twice a week, and be to reported, and my happiness will be complete. Those men have been my enemy for a long, long time. And no memories of my life are so pleasant as my reminiscence of their long and honorable career in the tone-imparting service. Now that 1 am living tolerably near the city, I run down every time I see it announced that " Horace Greely, Peter Cooper, and several other distinguished citizens will occupy seats on the platform." Thus J have been enabled to see these substantial old friends of mine sit on tho platform and give tone to lectures on anatomy, and lectures on agriculture, and lectures on stirpiculturc, and lectures on astronomy, on chemistry, on miscegena lion, on " Is Man descended from the Kangaroo?" on vertciinary matters, on all kinds of religion, and several kinds of politics ; and have seen them give time and grandeur to the Four-legged Girl, the Siamese Twins, the great Kgyptiau Sword Swallowei 1 , and the Old Original Jacobs. Whenever somebody is to lecture on a 6ubject not of general interest, 1 know that my venerated remains of the Old Red Sandstone Period will be ou the platform ; whenever a lecturer is to appear whom j nobody has heard of before, nor will be likely to seek to see, 1 know that the real benevolence of my old friends will be taken advantage of, and that they will be on the platform (and in

! the bills) as an advertisement ; and whenever any new and obnoxious rascality in philosophy, morals, or politics, is to be sprung upon the people, I know perfectly well that these intrepid old lieores will be on the platform too, in the interest of the full and free discussion, and to crush down all narrower and less generous souls with the solid dead weight of their awful respectability. And let us all reinbember that, while these inveterate and imperishable presiders (if you please) appear on the platform every night in the year as regularly as the volunteered piano from Steinway's or Ghickering's and have bolstered up and given tone to a deal of questionable merit and obscure emptiness in their time, that they have also diversified this inconsequential service by occasional -powerful uplifting and upholding of great progressive ideas which smaller men feared to meddle with or countenance.