WHO IS SNYDER?

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1182, 5 June 1874, Page 2

WHO IS SNYDER?

The Auckland correspondent of tho Otago Daily Times writes : " Tour readers will not yet have forgotten an old Otago celebrity (Mr James Browne), once connected with your paper. Mr Browne left Ofcago for the West Coast, thence to Malborough, and finally settled in Auckland, where ho is comfortably ensconced in the editorial chair of the New Zealand Herald. Mr Browne has achieved celebrity in Auckland chiefly by the vein of rich and kindly humor with which nature has endowed him. As ' Snyder' his sketches have attained great popularity and been repeatedly copied in the New Zealand and Australian papers. In Auckland ' Old Snyder' is an institution. He appears weekly in the Herald, and his pieces are sometimes reproduced in tho daily issue of that journal. The Weekly News, a rival issue from the Southern Cross office, has lately fallen foul of Snyder, and indirectly accused him of plagiarising Mark Twain. So, there has been a passage of arms, iu which the Cross comes oft' second best. The Herald reprinted Mark Twain side by side with ' Snyder.' The subjects were the same—namely, ' Life Insurance,' but there is certainly not the slightest similarity in manner, matter, nor mode of treatment. Put together, one sees how rich and pleasant the humor of 'Snyder' is, even at the side of a master in the art like Mark Twain, with whom he docs not unfavourably compare. I mention this because I believe it is contemplated by Mr Browne to make a collection of his writings for publication, and it will be exceedingly unfair that they should have a prejudice excited against them by false charges of plagiarism. Mr Browne was on the staff of the first free journal started in Tasmania. Ho was through the whole of the Australian Groldfields iu their palmiest days, when men nailed up ten-pound notes against the wall, and ordered the landlord to supply free drinks to all comers so long as the notes would pay. I have seen him convulse lar<j;e audiences with his lectures, and any book published by him ought to be of wide colonial interest, as I am sure it would be." [The writer of tho above, had he been aware of it, might also have mentioned the fact that Mr M. L. Browne, son of Mr Jamas Browne, and late editor of tho Charleston Herald, is one who has risen from the ranks of the Otago Daily Times office, in which he some years ago filled the position of "reader boy," to tho responsible post of sub-editor of tho N. Z. Herald.]