How should one spell Methuselah? Too good not to read.

The fact is there really is nothing funnier than an exchange of letters in 19th century British periodicals. So I present the following, from an 1851 issue of The Musical World:




As you can see, the playwright Charles Mathews was criticized for having a character called Methusalem in his play Ringdoves. I would love to have seen the original criticism, but alas, I have not.

Apparently too much nonsense for a סופר סת"ם from Manchester, probably Michael Hart Simonson, who writes:



Mathews, by the way, was a comedian, in case it wasn't obvious from his reply (as it might not have been to M.H.S. ).