Life — October 3, 1895 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

- LIFE: THE LITERATURE OF PHILADELPHIA. HILE the litera- ture of the earth may be dismissed with a paragraph, the arts and letters of Philadelphia must be treated with no vandal touch, We speak with and reverence of a literature always loyal to Home It was in Philadelphia that G. W. Childs first tapped the sparkling artesian well of mortuary vers waters glittered in the conduits of his vivacious paper like a nickel-plated In the airy and awe , Whose door-knob, marched with grace dignity of a colored funeral—top of column, next to reading matter. No deceased Philadelphian was so humble as to be deemed unworthy of a tandem of quatrains in the literary morgue. Then came Wanamaker—J. Wanamaker, late censor of literature and dispenser of stamps to the United States—who equals, if he does not surpass, the burnished beauty of those sonnets by his impassioned panegyrics of in the daily pres: In the medieval days of Philadelphia, Godey kept the lamp burning when all the outer world was buried in E: i darkn He rollicked in deformed fashion-plate |. and answers to correspondents; his crochet department was the envy of Boston, and his fearless and uncompromis- ing dress patterns were the despair of Bohemia. The rise of Lippincott marked the renascence of literature and the formulation of the doctrine that literary the best mental food. These were, of course, only the gropings of her early days, the short and simple annuals of Philadelphia. A broader and higher destiny awaited her ; the day was at hand when the name of Pennsylvania was to be changed to Pen-and- inksylvania; the clock was striking the hour when her poets and prosers were to discover microbes in the Hyperian ; when the Childs artesian well was to be condemned by the Board of Health and yearning Philadelphia was to rush thirstily to the literary brewery to quaff the mellow Bok. Out of the mosquito-haunted penetralia of New Jersey was to come a prophet who would take literature by the scruff of the neck and get a hustle on it; and at the ap- pointed hour—the four o'clock tea—the Messianic Bok arrived. Society reporters suggested that he was a child of the Asiatic-Irish bard Bokhara ; the ladies’ clubs asserted he led the German on Olympus; a Callowhill poet whispered that he was issued by a plate matter syndicate; a vulgar sporting paper alleged he was sired by Welsh Rarebit and his verse Ledger the feet of tinware and underwea grits, serials, were spring dammed by Nightmare. All was mystery. He arrived and Philadelphia fell down and worshipped him. He proceeded at once to reform literature; he broadened it even as the lawn roller broadens the squash bug. He slew style; he scorned wit; he abolished imagination ; he entombed humor ; he preached the gospel of dullness and platitude. He gave fame and fortune to the decayed and collateral relatives of intellectual giants, and taught that clay was designed to make bricks, not porcelain. He proved that humor was a sign of mental incapacity, and called Jerome K. Jerome the British Mark Twain, driving the original Mark to strong drink and language. He raised the Ladées’ Home Journal to the pinnacle of fame by a series of tender e s on “Fine Starching,” * How to Make Soft Soap Softly,” * Are Lungs Useful in Literature ?” “ The Influence of Woman on Browning, Blacking and Blueing,” and other equally timely and stirring topics. Thus Philadelphia became Athenian and the magazine magnates were reduced to lowly day laborers in the Elysian Fields. Enduring monuments in type metal to Greeley and Coxe delight the art-loving New Yorker ; atrocities in bronze prance at the capitol to recall defunct warriors; and what will Philadelphia do for him who chained the wild ass of Manayunk and sold Pegasus to the horse railroads? Let the grateful city build to Bok, the stepfather of his country, a monument of brass crowned with tin laurels and surrounded by terra cotta maidens of the new age, and let it be placed in City Hall yard beside the weird figure of B, Franklin. Nothing else will fittingly recall the glories of the epoch- making prophet when his inspired type-writer is in the ash heap and he has ceased from his Titan labor of filling aching voids and supplying long-felt wants. Joseph Smith, Src YT: in Heaven [DITOR: If there are, they will be run by amateurs. suppose there will be any newspapers AFTER THE BAL MASQUE. Old Tom: MY INSTINCT TELLS ME TO TACKLE THAT, BUT MY REASON WHISPERS THAT A RAT THAT CAN GET AWAY WITH A WHOLE MAN HAD BETTER BE LEFT ALONE! Comicbooks.com