Life — August 19, 1909 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

an eminent American doctor.) HEN the lass for whom you lan guish Ils your soul with sudden anguish, By refusing you in manner most con. clusiv When the spinster you're pursuing, Or the widow you are wooing, Proves indifferent, — unw elusiv When the wreck of ev'ry idol Tends to feelings suicidal, Such emotions you must you're able, And replace your shattered treasures With the more consoling pleasures Of the Table. bridal, if Should adversity assail you, Or should friends desert and fail you. Or your business smash and leave you stripped and stony, You can seck for consolation In the fond anticipation Of a dish of macaroons or macaroni, With a meal a man may master The effects of each disaster : Tt applies a healing plaster to the stricken. All our sorrows we can bury As we contemplate a merry— Thought of chicken! $ LIKE \ LOVE SET Clams or canvasback or curry, As a remedy for worry, Are beyond my poor capacity for praising ; I could write a score of ballads On the soothing pow'r of sala Which as sedatives naising When I lose a near relation, Or a paying situation, Or a train at any station (where my are quite bag is), Is my faith in mortals shaken? No! I order eggs and bacon, Or a ha For, though Fate be unforgiving, While the world contains cold mutton, Life is surely well worth living, For the glutton! Harry Graham, Purely Local Most American humorists have not been widely famous because they have failed to create h not found and Twain RISTOPHANES dealt with local conditions. They were conditions peculiar to the Grecian state. His jibes at Cleon and Euripides and his trenchant hits at the war party were all local. Rabelais dealt with the local condi. tions of his age. His book tensely humorous allegorical description of what was going on under his nose. Cervantes dealt, in chivalry, with local conditions or with conditions peculiar to his age. or independent of local conditions realized elsewhere.—Mark is an in- Chaucer was local The humor around the grave of Ham- let in Bacon's play of that n. s it Shakespeare?) was local Istaff and Prince Hal, thouga pos: sessing universal characteristics, were local. Mark Twain wrote the Jumpi: of Calveras County, Frog so careful to make the conditions local that he actually named the place. He wrote about Tom Sawyer and the Mississippi. His book, “Innocents Abroad,’? was local in the sense that it dealt with local characters. If Mark Twain should argue, in reply to this, that he and the others mentioned selected only those local conditions that are really universal to human nature, the answer is that all local conditions are this. Anything that anyone chooses to write is not isolated. It cannot be in the nature of things. No. The reason why Mark Twain has a bigger reputation than other Amer: humorists has turned—out a better grade of humor. doesn’t make so much difference what a man writes about, as how he writes it You can write about anything, if you about ican is because he turns—or only know how, and it will go. Hesiod took the Frogs and the Mice. took a sofa. Shakespeare (or was it Bacon?) took stories already written and rewrote them. . Everything has been written about al- dy. Why do we ea await, there- re, what the next to say? ot because of the subject, but the man The best art is only personality Some ask if Mark Twain will live. Posterity is unreliable. He has played some queer tricks on really deserving folk. comicbooks.com