THE WOODEN HORSE.

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 67, 10 June 1927, Page 12

THE WOODEN HORSE.

AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN. And with great lies about his wooden Set the crew laughing and forgot his course. —J. E. Flecker. The Editor has obligingly handed jne the following letter: THE DISPOSAL OF AUNT ELIZA. Sir, —On going through Squire’s ‘‘Comic Muse” I came across an old Acquaintance, the delicious quatrain: “In the drinking well Which the plumber built her Aunt Eliza fell—- • We must get a filter.” Now, Sir, on hygienic, economic, and Sentimental grounds I object: T’have the water How Through the garden’s wiser: Since she loved it so T’would be fair t’Eliza.” I am, etc., W.HJ. So easy a beginning tempts me to go on in the easiest possible way. J shall divert the overflow from my box of cuttings into this channel, yery well then: Somebody reviewing the new book about George Eliot recalled Gosse’s famous glimpse of her. I met several times, driven slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose appearance 1 took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it. Virginia Woolf, who wrote “Jacob’s Room” (? exactness of the title) and “Mrs Dalloway” and “The Common Reader,” a book of critical articles mostly from “The Times Literary Supplement,” is the daughter of Leslie 3tephen, her husband is Leonard Woolf, and her sister is married to Clive Bell, the art critic. Sylvia Townshend Warner was brought up it Harrow. One of her father’s fellowtnasters said that she was “the cleverest fellow we had.” A London bookseller recently offered for 20/- a copy of “Poetical Considerations upon Refin'd Politicks, and the Master-Stroke of State, as Practis'd by the Ancients hnd Moderns,” in the first edition, contemporary calf Bvo., and printed for H. Clements in 1711. That is dull; but it is enlivening to note that the particular copy belonged to Rosina, Lady Bulwer-Lytton. wife of the novelist, and that she wrote on the endpaper this couplet: What name think you in hell is most blackly written? Without doubt it is that of Sir Liar Coward Lytton. Of Gibbon’s first book, “Essai sur I’Etude de la Literature,” 1761, he Wrote in his “Memoirs”: A small impression was slowly dispersed. . . . The Publication of ray History 15 years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the Essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the permission Which Becket solicited of reprinting it .... and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to tjie fanciful price -of a guinea •r thirty shillings. Seven guineas was the price in the •atalogue just referred to. Verlaine, »n being told that the Germans might enter Paris, said: “Well, at least we have some good music.” Auber the composer never took ofT hfs hat, ¥ he could help it: he wrote his music with his hat on, ate with his hat on, iook boxes rather than stalls at the beatre so that he might sit with his at on, and went to the synagogue, 'hough not a Jew, for the same reason. Lessing, the great critic, ran ap such bills at the Beershop in Hamburg that his credit was four times stopped. Brahms, by the way, always ordered tuppeny beers, because he rhought he got more in two tuppeny glasses than in one fourpenny. The nieces of Dr Lyttelton, formerly Head Master of Eton, used to sing at Christmas time “When shepherds washed their frocks by night.” It should have been mentioned above that beer is as proper a drink for maids of honour as for critics, though whether their credit is as often stopped I do not know. Here, "n evidence, is Henry VIII.’s order for a day’s provision for one of the ladies of honour of Catherine of Aragon:

We will and command you to allow daily from henceforth unto our right dear and well beloved lady Lucy, into her chamber, the diet and fare hereafter ensuying. 1. Every morning at breakfast a sirloin of beef at our kitchen, one loaf at our pantry bar, and a gallon of ale at our buttery bar. 2. At dinner a piece of beef, a stroke Inf roast, and a reward at our said kitchen, and a gallon of ale at our buttery bar. 3. At afternoon a loaf of bread at our pantry bar and half a gallon of ale at our buttery bar. 4. At supper a mess of porage, a piece of mutton, and a reward at our said kitchen, a loaf of bread and a gallon of ale. 5. At after supper half a gallon of wine at our cellar bar. 6. At our chaundrve bar in winter every night, one preket and 4 sizes of wax, with 8 randies and one torch. A picture of the London lost, happily revealed again during the calsimity of the*£oal Strike: Looking down from the Spaniards Jload at Hampstead, I was astonished at the revelation of a new London that ha* followed from the wiping away of our pall of smoke. The outlines of the picture were as sharp and clear as Sn an 18th century print. The dome of St. Paul’s, no longer a dim vision, hang there, bold and magnificent, tipped, even, with the gleam of its new gold. As one goes about the streets in theso days, especialJ; 7 if it is a dean evening after rain, it it easy to fancy oneself living in the pre-industrial age. The street viataa. and notably the outlines of roofs and chimneys, are full of unfamiliar lines and colours. And note ihe curious nearness of all the towers r.nd spires, the wonderful, milky whiteness of Wren’s steeples, no longex spec'rml, but close and satisfying. It is curious how completely even now the sp*rit of Wren dominates the city. 1 took a motor-boat trip from Westminster to the Pool some days ago, and enjoyed a view of London piled up the river which was new in mi- ex-

perience. and I have been looking nt it l»»r a generation. In that wild jumble of architectural styles it was the Wren spires that gave a soul to the scene; the bridal cake of St. Bride’s, the airy fantasy of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, the flame-topped Monument. How gallantly they answered the brutal challenge of the new age in the swaggering bulk of Bush House and the glorified warehouse at London Bridge. But for the coal strike one’s impressions of these things would be a blur. All necessary acknowledgments to Captain Cuttle. J.H.JBLS.