One hundred years ago
Mr Barnum, misled by the en- thusiasm manifested in this country for Jumbo, evidently thinks that the English are susceptible about elephants, and has sent over a beast purchased in Burmah, which he declares to be one of the 'white' variety held there to be semi- sacred. The daily journals are helping him and publishing minute accounts of the creature, and of the 'gentle' way in which it walks up gangways, but we suspect he will be disappointed. The Public fancies that a white elephant is white, and will hold that a slate-coloured brute with pink patches, not eight feet high, and not otherwise remarkable, is not the animal it is looking for. Jumbo was really the biggest beast existing in the world, for people never think of a whale as a beast, though it is one, and the common folk admired it as such; but Toung is neither big nor beautiful, nor anything else, except possibly sacred' among a people who are less known in England than any race in Asia. Mr Barnum should give some sharp Yankee chemist a few thousand dollars to invent a new bleaching process, and then show his elephant in the colours Which the populace expect. They have never read travels in Burmah, and do not know that, with one exception, every 'white' elephant is slate-coloured or drab, while the exception, a mere lusus naturae, was pink.
Spectator, 19 January 1884
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