Page 12 Advertisements Column 1

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12621, 4 December 1926, Page 12

A correspondent of the “Observer,” stirred into actuarial activity by the length of Mi Wells’s three-volume novel, lias been calculating the lengths of certain classic work. The average modern novel runs to about 80.000 words; tho calculator makes out that “Tom Jones” is about 310,000 words in length, “Peregrine Pickle” about 020,009, ami Richardson's “Pamela” about og-l.OOO! .Scott seems to have w-rked to a definite scale ; the Waver■vv novels average approximately 150,000 each, but- Dickens ranged from 15(3,000 in “A Tale of Two Cities” to 390,000 in “David C'opperfield.” John Drinkwater has been spending tho greater part of tho summer with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, in order to obtain the local atmosphere for his dramatization of Mr Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge.” A correspondent of the “Spectator” quotes from Sir Edmund Gosses •'Life” of Swinburiio nil anecdote illustrating the poet’s modesty “Swinburne, when asked at Jewett’s dinner-table which of the great English poets had tho host .■nr, replied, ‘with earnestness and grav* il.v: “Shakespeare, without doubt; then .Milton; then Shelley; then, I do nnl knew what other people would do, but 1 should put myself." -