Life — October 22, 1891 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LIFE “While there's Life there's Hope.” XVII. OCTOBER 22d, 1891. 28 West Twenty-THinD Street, New York. VOL. Published every Thursday. $5.00. year in advance, postage free. Sing’ le copies to cents. Back numbers can be had by applying to this office. Vel. 1, bound, $30.00; Vol. I1., bound, $1 Back numbers, one year old, 20 cents per copy. Vols. HII to XVI, frelusive, bound or in flat humbers,at $s 00 per volume. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope. Subscribers wishing address changed will greatly facilitate matters by sending old address as wellas new. HE business of being a George ‘ Washington has been found to be profitable and popular. It would be natural, therefore, to ex- pect that it would be overdone. y But it isn't, It is attempted from time to time, but there must be exceptional difficul- ties about it, for only with the most particular scarcity does it get itself achieved. ) The late Senor Balmaceda may be said to have tackled 7 the George Washington job, but the variations he insisted upon introducing changed the part so radically that a United States audience would not Nhave known it for the same. He made a very bad mess of it and was hissed off the stage, and died suddenly in the wings, some weeks ago, as we all re- member. * . s N® OR did General Boulanger do much better; nor we , his exit any more satisfactory. He in- sisted in running a strain of low comedy into the “42,part which destroyed its dignity ; and he tempered “its austerity besides in a way that destroyed its moral effect. Balmaceda accomplished nothing but harm, but at least he was tragic. But Boulanger accomplished nothing at all, not even harm, and was merely absurd. M R. PARNELL far outdid both of them. He had i the great advantage of being half American, which relieved him of the necessity of prating about * glotre, and of messing himself up mopportunel: the gore of unlucky opponents. Parnell actually plished something which survived him. with accom= He was strong *+and patient, and was in the way of becoming a real, great man, when his evil genius overtook him, and he went mi: cellancously to the demnition bow-wows. Just what happened to Parnell is something for meditative persons to speculate upon. Was it the woman's doing, or was Kitty O'Shea only an incident of an inevitable collapse ? The degeneration that gradually showed in him was physical, moral and in- tellectual all at once. He became a sick man, who had to be long absent from his business; he took up with his friend's wife; and he ceased to behave with ordinary intelli- gence toward his political allies. It is a remarkable story, and whenever it is veraciously written out it will make instructive and edifying reading. And it will be written out, for with all his short-comings Parnell was not a man to be forgotten. One deduction that can be safely made from his biography in advance of publication, is that for a man who essays to play George Washington before a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon audience, one of the handiest of properties is a set of working morals in reasonable repair. HERE is somethin: most providential in the circumstance that when the baseball news ends the college news begins. It is pleasant to have the colleges at’ work again, and get the bottom facts about football three or four times a week. The great football games of the Thanksgiving season can life, Taken in connection with = the fall elections, they effectually diver- SS sify the sombre month of November. S ° ® . = Now then, Tammany, you've got the earth; you try to keep it clean. let's see T would be hard to find a finer bit of American realism than the recent adver- tisements of a forth- coming novel by Mr. Howells. If Mr. Howells had composed the advertisements himself, they could not have been more like the actual thing with which the liberality of the soap and patent medicine gentlemen has made us so familiar. Mr. Howells himself, if he peruses the daily press, can hardly avoid the conclusion that he is the stuff, and that there are no flies on him. It is just possible that he may be a sympathetic reader of Mr. Stephenson's narrative of the experiences of Dromedary Dodd in the hands of the irre- pressible Pinkerton, comicbooks.com