"The Dutch Mail."

When, in 1827, Sir Richard Phillips published his Personal Tour through the Midland Counties, he related the following amusing incident:—

"When I was in Nottingham, I fell in with a plain elderly man, an ancient reader of the Leicester Herald, a paper which I published for some years in the halcyon days of my youth. Its reputation secured to me many a hearty shake by the hand, accompanied by the watery eye of warm feeling as I passed through the Midland counties. I abandoned it in 1795, for the Monthly Magazine and exchanged Leicester for London. This ancient reader, hearing I was in Nottingham, came to me with a certain paper in his hand, to call me to account for the wearisome hours which an article in it had cost him and his friends. I looked at it and saw it headed 'Dutch Mail,' and it professed to be a column of original Dutch, which this honest man had been labouring to translate, for he said he had not met with any other specimen of Dutch. The sight of it brought the following circumstance to my recollection:—

"On the evening before one of our publications, my men and a boy were frolicking in the printing-office, and they overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. The chief point was to get ready in some way for the Nottingham and Derby coaches, which at four in the morning required 400 or 500 papers. After every exertion we were short nearly a column, but there stood in the galleys a tempting column of pie. Now, unlettered readers, mark—pie is a jumble of odd letters, gathered from the floor, &c., of a printing-office, and set on end, in any manner, to be distributed at leisure in their proper places. Some letters are topsy-turvy, often ten or twelve consonants come together, and then as many vowels, with as whimsical a juxtaposition of stops. It suddenly bethought me that this might be thought 'Dutch,' and, after writing as a head, 'Dutch Mail,' I subjoined a statement that, 'just as our paper was going to press, the Dutch Mail had arrived, but as we had not time to make a translation, we had inserted its intelligence in the original.' I then overcame the scruples of my overseer, and the pie was made up to the extent wanted, and off it went as original Dutch, into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire! In a few hours other matter, in plain English, supplied its place for our local publication. Of course all the linguists, schoolmasters, high-bred village politicians, and correspondents of the Ladies' Diary, set their wits to work to translate my Dutch, and I once had a collection of letters containing speculations on the subject, or demanding a literal translation of that which appeared to be so intricate. How the Dutch could read it was incomprehensible! My Nottingham quidnunc at times had, for above four-and-thirty years, bestowed on it his anxious attention. I told him the story, and he left me, vowing, that as I had deceived him, he would never believe any newspaper again."