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"NEWSPAPER OBITUARIES.
SOME DEATHNOTICES WHICH WERE
A LITTLE TOO PREVIOUS.
(the xews agext.)
Newspaper obituaries are not always
written on the spur of the moment. In fact,
the reverse is, as a rule, the case, and the
lives of our greatest men are "taken," so to
speak, by the hand of tbe journalistic bio-
j,iajjuc£) ivjailj UbiUfc i rtvii.il kthyikr m UlQ
door. .In other words, at every important
newspaper office in the kingdom numerous
mempirs, shorter or longer, according to the
public position of the subject, axe regularly
"pigeon-holed," and held ready for
use when the fatal moment comes. These
memoirs are often written long before the
decease of the celebrated person. Whenever a
distinguished man reaches an advanced acre,
or is attacked by illness, or shows signsof
failing health, some member of the staff is
instantly told off to write his life-story. It
is a remarkable fact, well known to all
experienced journalists, that this practice of
writing obituaries of great men seems
almost invariably to have the effect of
keeping tbem alive. At any rate, tbey
rarely die very soon after their memoirs are
put into type, and sometimes many
years elapse before their departure gives
opportunity for their posthumous praises to
be sonn'dea. Instances are quite common in
which memoirs have been composed so long
before the event that the writers themselves
have been the first to die. A very curious
example of this is supplied in the case of The
Times biography of the late Earl Russell. It
was originally written about twenty years
before the statesman's decease. It was
" brought np to date" from time to time,
and, strange to say, every one of its con
tributors died, until a sort of ill-luck
seemed to attach to it, and no one
was inclined to touch it. Many hundreds
of columns must have been written and
printed about the Prince of Wales in 1871,
when he was suffering under a severe attack
of typhoid fever. A large portion of these
have, .perhaps, been preserved — it is to be
hoped not to be used for many a day. In one
case, a provincial journalist had prepared a
long memoir of the Prince, and on that
anxious day — a Sunday — when the heir-
apparent seemed hovering between life and
death, and when bulletins were being
sent from the newspaper offices to the
cnurcnes to oe read out irom tne pulpit, tho
writer gave orders that the article should be
sent to him in proof on the following Monday.
That morning the journalist in question, came
down to breakfast to find the ladies of his
family in tears. " The poor Prince," ex
claimed one, "is dead!" The journalist
then asked for evidence of the sad fact,
whereupon his own proofs, headed " Death
of the Prince of Wales," were handed to
him. "Is that all?" was the cold-blooded
remark. " All?" echoed the lady. "Dovou
mean to say that that article was written while
the Prince of Wales was alive ?" The journa
list frankly avowed that such was indeed
the case, and perhaps was not as much moved
as he ought to have been on being told that
"it was a great shame to do such things."
Some distinguished people havs shown no
objections to have their "lives taken " pre
maturely. More than ono instance could be
cited in whioh some public personage lias
actually been "interviewed" with a view
to a posthumous record of his life. It is a
tolerably well-ascertained fact that the great
Lord Brougham spread through the
intermediary of a relation a false re
port of his own death in order to see
what _ the newspapers would 6ay about
him, in which design he was more or less
satisfied, as he was biographised in several
journals. Miss Harriet Martineau, again,
wrote her own. memoir for tho Daily News,
and it remained for many years in the office
of that journal to be published in about five
columns at the time of her death. It is a ;
singular fact that the obituary leading articles :
on the death of Pope Pius IX. in The Times !
and the Daily Tclcgi aph respectively were
both written by the same hand. The author
was the late James MacdoneQ. He was
ou the staff of the . Telegraph when he wrote
tne article to be "pigeon-holed," and had
joined The Times some years before the Pope's
demise. Newspapers are rarely taken by
surprise in the case of a sudden death of a
great man. It was so, however, in one in
stance, as regards the decease of the late M. 1
Thiers. The news arrived late in the
evening; no memoirs were ready, but
five of tbe best writers ou the :
staff were employed to trace the great !
statesman's career, and in less than two
hours turned out among them about eight
columns of an able and interesting memoir.
In the case of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Tenny
son, Mr. John Ruskin, Sir Richard Owen,
Prince Bismarck, Count von Moltke, and
many other distinguished men of advanced
age, their memoirs are now ready either in
MS. or print in every leading journal in the
kingdom, wanting for their completion only
tbe details of the last hours of the illustrious
subject.
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