West of Tipperary

News is original in a sense, but newspapers are prepared to vie with one another for additional originality in almost anything, so long as they can lay claim to it.

For example, the New York Evening Graphic. Manhattan gum chewers’ sheetlet, property — of Bernarr Macfadden, planned a Crossword Puzzle Contest. Others copied it and one even went to the extent of printing the probable answers of the Graphic’s puzzles (TIME, Feb. 2). But the crossword puzzle contest wore out; and the Graphic promptly announced a new contest, or series of contests—$150 a day in prizes for the last line of incomplete limericks to be published.

Quite unabashed, the New York Evening Journal (Hearst) pounced upon the Limerick Contest. Before the Graphic had its new contest under way, the Journal had already begun a Limerick Contest with prizes of $200 a day.

Fuming, the Graphic editorialized:

This paper was not surprised yesterday when its Limerick Contest idea was pounced upon with desperate rapidity by the direct descendants of Ali Baba and his forty thieves on the New York Journal.

In the meantime, readers should remember that the best ideas are first in the Graphic. . . .

The makers of what’s called a “journal”

“Edit” a unscrambled diurnal;

No ideas can they hatch,

So they steal, paste and patch.

And feel they’re done something supernal.

Surely the invention of the limerick was a brilliant piece of originality. Who did it, or why he named the verseform after the country which lies just west of Tipperary, is not known. But the limerick was developed and popularized by Edward Lear 80 or 90 years ago. He was a young artist of 20 who had just published some colored plates of the rarer Psittacidae (parrots). The 13th Earl of Derby went up to London thereupon and lured Lear to go down to Knowsley to draw Derby’s private menagerie. While there, he wrote some poems for the delectation of his patron’s young grandson, the 15th Earl (to be). These included the first limericks of record and were published a few years later as the Book of Nonsense.

As a matter of fact, however, the limerick had not wasted away in the decades between Mr. Lear’s book and the Graphic’s rediscovery. Indeed, it has been a more or less regular attraction for some weeks in a contemporary though not a rival of the Graphic, published indeed in the same town—the literary supplement of The New York Evening Post. In the latter have been appearing for some weeks such gems as:

A great Congregational preacher

Told a hen, “You’re a wonderful creature.”

And the hen, upon that,

Laid three eggs in his hat

And thus did the Henry Ward Beecher.

There once was an old man of Lyme,

Who married three wires at a time,

When asked, “Why the third?”

He replied, “One’s absurd;

And bigamy, sir, is a crime!”

A tutor who tooted the flute

Tried to tutor two tooters to toot

Asked the two of the tutor:

“Is it harder to toot or

To tutor two tooters to toot?”

There was a young lady of Crewe

Who wanted to catch the 2.2

Said a porter, “Don’t worry,

Or flurry, or scurry,

It’s a minute or 2.2.2.2.”

There was an old man of St. Bees,

Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.

When asked, “Docs it hurt?”

He replied, “No, it doesn’t

I’m so glad that it wasn’t a hornet.”

(W. S. Gilbert)

There was a young person named Tate,

Who went out to dine at 8.8

But I will not relate

What that person named Tate

And his tete-a-tete ate at 8.8.

There was a faith-healer of Deal

Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,

If I sit on a pin

And it punctures my skin,

I dislike what I fancy I feel.”

There was a young girl at the shore

Had the same shape behind as before

You. never knew where

To offer a chair

So she had to sit down on the floor!

Undoubtedly, the Graphic did not hatch its idea from The New York Evening Post, for, since no Graphic reader would be likely to look at such a “highbrow” paper, the same might apply to its editors—and, besides, the Post did not offer prizes for last lines. However, the Encyclopedia Britannica, in its 1911 edition, remarked: “In recent years, competitions of the ‘missing word’ type have had a considerable vogue, the competitor, for instance, having to supply the last line of the limerick.”