There are many important celebrations this year, national, scientific, industrial and personal, but roaming through that amusing and fascinating domain of Gilbert and Sullivan an unusual celebration occurs. Some time this year—the day or month cannot be traced—is the 2ist birthday of Frederic, the unfortunate hero of "The Pirates of Penzance," whose guardians mis heard the dying injunction and apprenticed him until his 21st year to the pirates instead of the pilots of that historic port in Cornwall. Frederic, in his plaintive ditty, exclaimed:
I was born in leap-year, and that birthday Will not be reached by me till 1940, Gilbert and Sullivan have long ago past into the shades, with memories rich and respected, but the unfortunate hero which Gilbert created, to Sullivan's tuneful harmony, is still alive, and as he was apprenticed to the piratical trade until he reached his 21st birth he does not become of age until this year if we accept the year 1880 as the year of his birthday, which was the first production of "The Pirates of Penzance." There was undoubtedly something prophetic about this statement although Gilbert did not imagine it at the time, While it was a jibe at conventions and the calender it also transferred the eminent partnership into lasting memory for the D'Oyly Carte companies continue as an annual institution and in English-speaking counties, especially the United States, the perennial humour and immortal melodies of this couple are as greatly enjoyed today as in the spacious Victorian days when society alternately shrank in horror or laughed with uncontrolled glee at Gilbert's piquant caricatures of English society and institutions, and it is said that Queen Victoria was so perturbed that she long withheld the knighthood from Gilbert which was early conferred on Sullivan for his religious music.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.