A COLONIAL WEAKNESS.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1246, 5 March 1878, Page 3

A COLONIAL WEAKNESS.

Under this heading the “Maryborough Advertiser ” makes the following very truthtul remarks : —We are more enamoured, in this colony, of big names than even the Americans. Everything must have the epithet “ grand ” attached to it. We have grand concerts, g and demonstrations, grand performances at the theatres, grand banquets, grand fine arts distributions, and so forth. There are literally no Hunts to the so called “grandeur,” and no application of it is considered to bo absurd We scorn such good old titles as “ inn ” and “ tavern ” and put “hotel” in their stead. A miserable shanty where dyspepsia, a populous bed and general disgust may be had for three or four dollars a day, is as much a hotel as Scott’s or Menzie’s. Public dinners are out of vogue ; we will compromise for nothing less than a “banquet.” If the fable be ill-supplied, and the supply altogether unsatisfactory, it is a banquet, nevertheless. Better is a banquet without wine and with nothing to eat than a dinner flowing with the choicest vintage of the grape and heaped with every luxury. Cottages and country houses have verbally been demolished and “villas” erected on their sites. Dressmakers have grown to be modistes ; corn doctors, chiropodists ; tailors, sign-painters, and bashers, artists. A manager is an impressrio —which penny a liners usually spell impressario, by the way, as if they imagine it had something to do with the press. The skippers of excursion steamboats are all captains ; while schoolmasters and mountebanks are professors. Long endured incapibles and men re ected in repeated acts of dishonesty who have been dismis-cd from position are said to have tendered their resignation; and confessed thieves are permitted to retire from office on account of suspected “ irregularities.” There is no end to our big names and fine phrases. Presently no doubt we shall speak of bar maids as dispensers of aesthetic cocktails, and of burglars as gentlemen of irrepressible dynamic instinct.