Editor's Table [pp. 308-315]

Editor's Table.
and "Two Millions" had so prepossessed
u s in his favour, that we f elt sur e anything
he might write in rhyme woul d be worth
reading. Then, too, th e ti t le of the ne w
effort was suggestiv e. We did not, of
cours e, kno w what Richmond was to be
celebrated by the poet. Our thoughts ran
b ack through so me y ears to a delicious
twilight spent one tea e the' terrae of th e f Star
and Garter," looking down on the silver
Thames and its emerald meadows, and
we supposed it probable that the Richmond of Pope and Thomson might have
found a new interpreter of its beauty in
landscape. Again, it might be that the poet
had escaped, on some fine summer evening,
from the heat, noise and dust of the great city
in which he resides, to the sweet slopes of
Staten Island, and there, above that Richmond, in sight of the exquisite bay sprinkled with the sails of New York's extended
commnerce, had given full sway to the emotions of his poetic soul. But we never
once thought of our Richmond being honoured by Mr. Butler's muse, and our astonishment was therefore great, when we
read in the Independent the following remarkable composition:
Among the tricks of advertising now resorted to in our large cities, one of the
most common is that of iterating the same
sentence over half a dozen columns of
half a dozen newspapers, so that whatever journal the reader may look over at
the breakfast table, he will find the name
of some novelty in literature, the dramia,
or the useful arts, staring him in the face.
A good story is told of a wager made by a
wag at the St. Nicholas Hotel, that he
could commit to memory in two minutes
an entire column of the New York Herald,
and of his winning it by a simple count of
the number of times a certain line had
been repeated and reciting aloud, "Buy
BONNER'S LEDGER!" "BuY BONNER'S LEDGER!" to the foot of th e column. Even the
so-called religious newspapers have not
scrupled to employ this device of repetition in their advertisements, and for a
week before its appearance, we saw a
certain poem entitled, "At Richmond,"
by William Allen Butler, heralded,-yes,
and Tributned and Times'd profusely, as
about to be given to the public in the New
York Independent. We confess to having
been inspired with a curiosity to see the
poem. Mr. Butler's "Nothing to Wear"
AT RICHMOND.
At Richmond, in the month of May,
I climbed the city's lofty crest;
Below, the level landscape lay,
And proudly streamed, from east to west,
The glories of the dawning day.
There stand the statues Crawford gave
His Country, while with bleeding heart,
She showered upon his open grave
The laurels of victorious Art,
And wept the life she could not save.
How grandly, on that granite base,
The youthful hero sits sublime;
The Leader of the chosen Race,
The noblest of the sons of Timne,
With all his future in his face.
And he who framed the matchless plan
For Freedom and his Fatherland,
Type of the just, sagacious Man,
Like Aristides, calm and grand,
With the Roman Vatican.
1859.]
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