Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 195, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1915 — Home of Edward Lear. [ARTICLE]

Home of Edward Lear.

Knowsley, England, should be dear to all children as the birthplace of many of their favorite rhymes. Edward Lear lived there for four years during the time of the thirteenth Lord Derby, and invented his first book of nonsense verses for the amusement of his patron’s children. The idea of composing these was suggested to him by a friend at Knowsley, who in an unguarded moment uttered the pregnant words: "There was an old man of Tobago.” "That was enough for Lear,” writes Mr. lan Malcolm, “and he ransacked the index to the Atlas of the World to find the names of places from which ‘an old man’ or ‘an old lady’ might have come. Thus he commandered Smyrna, Ischia, Columbia and Moldavia: but for ingenuity of rhyme I should divide the first prize between the old man of Abruzzl, So blind that he couldn't his foot see, and the old man of Thermopylae, Who never did anything properly.