A MAD ITALIAN CORRESPONDENT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 1, Issue 103, 22 May 1880, Page 3

A MAD ITALIAN CORRESPONDENT.

There is a very harmless form of insanity which finds vent in writing to the newspapers. Among the letters which are received by editors there .are very frequently some which are either absolutely incoherent, or if coherent, are evidently, by their style and contents, the work of madmen. There is a mad letter-writer in Turin whose correspondence is causing serious annoyance to the public in New York, and has occasioned a good deal of discussion among the postal authorities there. He began by sending from 50 to 100 letters each mail some four or five months ago, and up to this time between 2,000 and 3,000 of his epistles have arrived there, and a large proportion of which have been delivered to the persons to whom they were addressed. One of the chief objections that the recipients have to receiving his correspondence is that none of his letters are prepaid, and 10 cents for unpaid postage is collected by the mail carriers on each letter. The recipients, regarding the matter as an oversight on the part of some foreign or travelling friend, pay the postage and open the letters, only to find them filled with senseless twaddle in Italian, with a faulty English translation appended, the nonsense being usually addressed “to the noble and illustrious reader, and the writer subscribing himself as “ The Emperor of the World, Monarch of the Universe.” The last mail from Europe to New York brought no fewer than 600 of these letters, and so great is the annoyance caused to the recipients, and so angry and voluminous the ebrrespoddence between them, and, the postal authorities that' it has been decided;,to send a communication, to the Italian Government, ..-“aking them that the lunatic’s mail suppressed at Turin. It may be that a short time since a appeared in the English papers Adeeming the annoyance caused by the receipt of numbers oE unpaid letters from Italy by London merchants and tradesmen, and it is by no means improbable that the writer is the same person who has now transferred his attention to the other side of the Atlantic, — Standard.