LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2814, 19 February 1908, Page 82

LITERARY NOTES.

i — Lady Warwick is setting herself the task of writing her memoirs from the point of viaw of a leader of society. A readable volume should be the outcome of her memories of the. many ce'ebrjtics, from royalty downward, with whom she has come in contact in English aristocratic circles within the ppst two decades or so. 1 —An interesting and welcome re-issue is announced by Mr Murray— a reprint of John Wilson Crokor's "Stories Selected from the History of England." The work will be familiar to many people, now of middle age, as one of the frier.dß of their yout'i. It had a very large circulation during the ear'y and middle parts of last century. —Mr W. L Courtney, the editor of the Fortnightly, finds that his readers do not seem "to care for fiction in serial form. During the coming year, therefore, ho proposes to give them a short story, complete in each number, instead of a continuous romance. This is a quite natural sign of the times. A serial in a weekly journal people may manage to carry in their heads from instalment to instalment, but tho monthly intervals are too long. —It is difficult to realise that nearly a hundred years have passed since Tennyson was born' His works seem still so fresh and of our time, and so much in our hands. Yet so it is. In little more than a twelvemonth the preat centenary will be upon us, the hundredth anniversary of that marvellous year in which Darwin and Tennyson, Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln. Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Mendelssohn slid Einsla-kc, Edwar-1 Fits Gerald and Mrs Barreti Browniny. to name no others, all cam* l into the no>-!d. So far away it seems, and' yet so ner.r — Spectator. — Extraordinary e\amnlos of the pol.rica) rancour and uncon'piomising speech of Coke, the first Earl of Leicester (of the present cieaKon) are given in Mr*. Stii Imp's recently published biography. His whole creed was to fear Rod, help man. and hato Tories — "vile Tories and Iheir viler head. Mr Pitt " He was induced to tear himself a-wa-v from bis partridges and hie hounds, a,nd the country life, which with him was a passion, by the horrid fear of a Tory beine elected. "At the mention of a. Tory coming in." he afterwards confessed, "my blood chilled all over me from head to foot !" It was at the end of his rareer that his denunciation of Ooorge ITI as "the , worst man that ever sat on a throne, that ; bloody Kin<?!" cost him, for a while, the peeroge which he at length desired to accept. — America is a, rerrarkable continent of i extremes, not only of heat and eo'd. but of practicability and fanaticism, of iest and , earnest. The most flippant and the most seriou.. works come out of the United States. The American temperament applies itself with passionate zeal to what it conceives as the real business of life, and uses its laughter in the intervals by way of recreation. The American divides his time into "watertight romnartments, but he h also a quiek-ehange artist, and our slow. insular wits follow him in a bewildered and puzzlino- manner, almost with disapproval, as he skips to and fro. Hi« sense of nyimour appears and reappears like a iflok-m-the-box. But while he is^t work he is as ardent as those of his ancestors who happened to be Puritans This does not arise from any Puritan strain subsisting but it :s: s an affair of climate — Marriot Watsdci, in the London Mail. — "K. Kesbit (Mrs Bland) has mst published an interesting poem entitled, ".Tesns in London," which receives high praise in the London press. It is in the tone of the celebrated novel. "If Christ Cnme to Chicago," as its title indicates. Hero are two representative verses: — If Jesus came to London. Came to London to-dpv. He would not go to the West End, He would come down our way ; He'd talk with the children dancing To the organ out in the street. And say He was their big Brother, And give them something to eat. • He'd see what God's image looks like, When men have dealt with the same — Wrinkled with work that is never done, Swollen and dirty with shame. He'a see on the children's foreheads The branded gutter sign That marks the girls io be harlots, That dooms the boys to be swine. "Simple, pathetic, and appealing," as the poem is said to be by one critic, it loses nothing in force and suggest i\ en ess thereby, and the effect is heightened by the sujrgestive pictures by Spencer Pryse which illustrate the book. „ — "Alice in Wonderland" is too whimsical and subtle for the gra-sn of children. Read it to a.n intelligent child, and thoueh you yourself may bo woepmrr with laughter over it, you will rarely pr-t f smile from

your little listener. The dialogue is beyond the child, for whom much of th« humour is impossible. The action tells. How is it, then, that the book sells in 6uch numbers? It is because we are hypocrites. We buy the book pretending that it will delight the children, knowing that it is for our own joy that we get it. It is one of the best-loved books in €he whola world, but we are a little shy of buying it for ourselves. You are thankful when some new opportunity arises for reading ife to a child who has not previously hearbt it. You know that it will be above that child's head, but you revel again in th« fun of dialogue and incident which you know almost by heart. — Evening Standard. — The one-hundredth anniversary of thebirth of John Greenleaf Whittier, who first dr«w breath at Heverhill, Massachusetts, December 17, 1807, brought to his birthplace and to the town of Amesbury, which was his home for many years (writes Harper's Weekly), pilgrims from far and" near. For the Quaker poet was closer to the bearfc of his New England than any other of. her poetic sons. It wag a characteristic of this special celebration that one recojrnised here a certain intimate and friendly _ feelingwhich made it seem almost a . neighbourhood affair. Whiltier was such an admir-, abk neighbour and so warmly beloved m his immediate vicinity that his own placeguards with jealous care all that was his. His home at Amesbury and his birthplace at Haverhill are each regarded with deepest veneration. He was their poet, friend, and also their first oitizen. All day tho Whittier homestead was open to the many guests who came to offer tribute to him whoso gentle spirit seems verily to hoyer about the place filled with such plenteous memories, and also with the manifold household belongings- which are still as the poet left them. The books, the pictures, the furniture are just as they were when his gentle presence was withdrawn. — Som« critics find in his Early Poems, and mainly in the pastoral and romantic part, of them, the true, or at anyrate the truest and ereatest, Tennyson (says The Times). They think that the laureafe Tennyson of later days, the I Tennyson of the realm and empire, oF i "Maud," of the "Poems and Ballads," of "Rirpah." of "The Revenge," of "The 1 Ancient Sae;e," and of "Crossing the Bar." !is somehow 'ess true and less poetic That 1 would seem to be a mistake. Professor , Churton Collins takes a much justcr view I when he writes: — "It would be no oxag- ! geratinn to say that Tennyson contributed* more than any man who has ever lived to> what may be called the hieher political edu- ' cation of the English-speaking races." Ho 1 grew with the growth and expansion of I the England of his time in realm and_ em- | pire not less than in science and idea. I In all this he was always the real Tennyson, I because always true to himself, and his very latest eong, the "Silfiit Voices," ie as true to the valley of the shadow as the delicious "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" is true to the fresh remembrance of the hour ! When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free In the silken sail of infancy. — Quite a number of literary anniversaries occu>- during this year, 1908. The threehundredth anniversary of Milton's birth 'a Bread street. Cheapside, is on December 9. Two lesser lights, Thomas Fuller and I Richard Fanshawe, were born in the same i year. June. 1608. In Arcril is the bi-oen-tenarv of the death of Thomas Sackville, fivst Ear! of Dorset, who col'aborated with Thomas Norton in writing the earliest tragedy in English blank versa, "Gorbodue." nh'ch was recited before his great kinswoman, Queen Elizabeth, in 1562 December marks tho tercentenary of the death of "Doctor" John Dee, mathematician and neeromanccr. who. in spate of being Elizabeth's net astrologer died in abject poverty. Two other Elizabethans who died in 1603 wove Sir Geoffrey Fenton, one of. the dis-tinp-uithod band of writers who flooded the English market in Shakespeare's day witrt translations from Ttnlian author? and their imitators ; and Bishop John Still, who i» sometime-; referred to as the author o£ "Gammer Gurton's Needle." William. Guthrie's bicentenary occurs ; he was ;i S'K)ttisl. historian, whom Johnson esteemed hicrhlv On September 5, HO3. died one of Johnson's contemporaries, John Home, whose trasredv of "Douglas." according io Gray, "retrieved the true language of the. stage, which had' been lost for two hundred years." but, according to Johnson, contained "not ten good lines in the who!© play." A minor anniversary falls on December 6. the centenary of the death of 'lhoma^ Moss a poet who is probably remembered to-day as the author of tho familia- "Beggar's Petition," beginning with the line. "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man." An anniversary of greater importance occurs on November 15 — the bicentenary of the birth of William Pitt, first Ear! of Chatham Two nineteenth century figures whose centenary occurs tins ypar are Cardinal Manning and the Hon. Mrs Ncrton. always associated (despite disclaimers) with the heroine of _ Air Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways."