Judge, 1914-07-25 · page 8 of 24
Judge — July 25, 1914 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon satirizes small-town boasting: a local proudly shows off "our new jail" to a visitor, reflecting provincial pride in civic infrastructure, however modest. The main article mocks Colonel Beanfugle, a self-important small-town intellectual who dominated his library's blank-verse section and publicly bullied the librarian into buying Elizabethan drama. His dominance ended when he encountered a single line from Shakespeare's *Macbeth*—"the sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care"—which he couldn't understand. Unable to comprehend why "care" has a "sleeve" or how sleep relates to it, the Colonel became so obsessed and confused that he abandoned blank-verse entirely. The satire targets pretentious amateur literary scholars who weaponize obscure knowledge locally but crumble when confronted with genuine complexity. His tyranny over the librarian is mocked as baseless bluster. The bottom cartoon is unrelated: a boy traded from baseball for a bullpup (given to his girlfriend as a romantic gesture).
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LOCAL PRIDE “Wa-al mister, what d'ye think of our new jail?” Colonel Beanfugie on Blank Verse «¢QHERE have you been?”’ queried Colonel Beanfugle, as his wife entered the Beanfugle home, thirty min- utes after the usual din- ner hour, with a delica- tessen meal showing its outlines through a paper bag in her hand. “T've been attending @ session of the Blank Verse Club, and we've had a perfectly lovely time reading a drama by Stephen Phillips.’’ “Well, I haven't done any blank vers- ing since I was a young man,"’ observed the colonel, magnanimously resolving to ray nothing about the lateness and cold- ness of dinner. ‘I used to hold the standing and broad jump championships when it came to declaiming blank verse. This Stephen Phillips has done his blank versifying since my time, or I'll bet you I could tell every line he ever wrote. Our town librarian couldn't hide a blank-verse specialist from me. I publicly denounced him before our Civic Improvement Soci- ety, because his set of Beaumont and Fletcher was one volume shy. I worried him until he spent about three-fifths of his annual appropriation for works in blank verse, when most of the townsfolk By ARTHUR CHAPMAN would have preferred Laura Jean Libbey. I was alone in my majesty as a blank- verse reader. As I went back over my precious Elizabethan blank-verse writers, I could see no other finger prints mingled with my own. The blank-verse section of the public library was practically my ownempire. I was monarch of all I sur- veyed, right up to the edge of the late- fiction department, and I might have been a blank-verse specialist yet, had it not been for a single line penned by one William Shakespeare." “What was that line?” asked Mrs. Beanfugle, frowning when she discovered that the delicatessen clerk had cut the smoked salmon and the Swiss cheese with the same knife. “It was that line in ‘Macbeth’ where Shakespeare tells about the ‘sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care." When I first read that line, T rolled it over on my tongue as a juicy mor- sel. It certainly had a fine and ringing sound when declaimed. It echoed and re echoed in my brain, until one day I asked myself, ‘Now, what does this line really mean?’ For the life of me, I couldn't trace any connection between sleep ands raveled sleeve. Nor could I figure out why care had any sort of a sleeve, raveled or unraveled. I puzzled over the thing till I grew wan and pale and lost my ap- petite. The line kept booming around in A FORCE PLAY First boy—1 hear you're out o' baseball, Jimmie? Second boy—Yes ; the manager traded me for a bull pup, and gave the pup to my best girl to win her affections, and I quit the game! comicbooks.com