Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 January 1878 — PERSONAL AND LITERART. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERART.

—The people of Wales are pleased with our new Minister io England because he’s Welch. —The wife of Gilman, the New York forger, has recovered h«r reason and gone to visit her husband. —Gen. Grant felt much, at home with Mount Vesuvius, both being the most distinguished smokers of their respective continents. —Elegant Mrs. Hooper, of Jfew York, who stole diamonds from, her society friends, has gone to the Penitentiary to be entertained for five years. —Fanny Davenport fell sod bumped her nose at the Detroit Opera-House recently, and a sorrowing country stands ready to offer its consolation and camphor l>ottle.— Boston Post. —Donn Piatt speaks of the Vermont Senator as “the captious and querulous Senator Edmunds, who failed of admission to the Episcopal Church, because he moved 336 amendments to thirty-nine articles.” —Judge Jere. Black not only chews plug tobacco, but he is in the habit of spitting all around him and caring not whom he hits. When he is out calling and wants to be “real nice,” he takes his hat along and spits in that.— Detroit free Press. i —Dr. Dio Lewis is now astride a new hobby-horse. In feather pillows the doctor has discovered tne Herod of our modern civilization. He attributes the majority of deaths among young chil- ' dren to overheated brains, the result of lying on feather pillows. —Nearly all the distfhguished Californians of the day are said to be selfeducated men. Senator Sargent is one example, Gov. Irwin another, Mayor Bryant, of San Francisco, another, and Messrs. Flood, Mackey, Fair, Jones and Sharon may be added to the list. —The Hawk-Eye has the details about Minister Welch’s arrival in England. “The Queen,” it says, “met him at the train and carried his grip-sack to the hack for him, and they rode up to the Tower together. She told him to leave his arctics on the porch and come in.” —This was the way in whieb Mark Twain introduced William D, Howells to a Hartford audience Wednesday night: “The gentleman who is now to address you is the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He ha t a reputation in the literary world wh jch I need not say anything about. lam only here to back up his moral character.”— Boston Globe. _ —Mark Twain’s success on the platform is said to ba much greater since he did away witjh his manuscript. From the written lectures he came down to copious nqces; from these to a little card with printed heads, which he put in his waistcoat pocket. He dispensed with this by substituting a few marks on tl ic back of his finger nails, and then he wwent it alone. —Dr. Sanford B. Hunt says, in the Newark Advertiser, concerning the editor of St, Nicholas: “ By some means she inspires the contributors to St. Nicholas lo extraordinary efforts-, and, instead of finding Longfellow. Whittier. Rrrvant, Proctor, George MacDonald, and the others, writing as if under a strain—as is the case with most authors when they depart from accustomed paths—in St. Nicholas we find them talking to the children just as they would if all the dear boys and girls were clustered about their knees, with the firelight playing strange tricks of coloring over the golden, the brown, and the gray heads.”