LITERARY NOTES

Received : Two more of Cecil Adair's popular stories, " Francesca" and "Maid of. the Moonflower," published by Stanley Paul and Co., London. The popularity of this writer is amazing. It is no wonder that her output is large, nor thai it finds a ready market. Her books show insight and a keen observation of men and things. She knows how to write for those impressionable young readers who are interested in lovemaking above all else. The tone of her work is wholesome, and the price of the novels is cheap.

"My Garden" and other versus Is a collection of the work of Mr. J. B. Hulbert, Wellington. " Sweet and Lovely Flower," " To a Child Crying," and " My Garden" are tender in sentiment and ring true. Much of Mr. Hulbert's verse is Temarkable for its ( fluency, rhythm, and easy rhyming, ' and, as verse, it has undoubted merit.

" New Zealand Lifex" published bimonthly, is a new magazine devoted to " New Zealand Life and Progress." One of its principal articles (which are mostly well illustrated) is devoted to the renaming of New Zealand, originating in a proposal made by Mr. A. G. Stephens, through the "Evening Post," that "New Zealand" should be shortened to "Zealandia," as being more euphonious and convenient. Various opinions on the subject were elicited, and Mr. T. M. Wilford was emphatically against any change, while Mr. Elsdon Best, admitting the euphony of the proposed substitute, said its one drawback is its. Dutch association. There are vjell-written articles on "The New Zealand Newspapers," " Mr. A. G. Grace and His Literary Work," the " Kindergarten Spirit" (by Edith Howes), and " New Zealand and the Pacific Ocean," together with notes and comments, and illustrations of New Zealand personages and scenery, in-elud-ing Tepro'ductions of exquisite etchings by Trevor Lloyd of New Zealand flora. The magazine is thoroughly national in spirit and origin.

"It is Tather a sad come-down from the books'of Harper, Fitzgerald, and Ross, the classics of New Zealand mountaineering, to 'The Conquest of the New Zealand Alps,' by Samuel Turner, 1' remarks the "Manchester Guardian." This notice continues : "Mr. Turner has done many good climbs and evidently has great energy and enterprise, but the modest spirit of the great mountaineering tradition is not in him, and to the lover of mountains it is mortifying to find tho accounts of so many fine expeditions marred by "so much egoism—the author's fatal hobby of seeing himself as the central figure of a kind of 'stunt.' Mr. Turner's special passion is for climbing first-class peaks—Mount Cook among them—alone. Of course, too much fuss has been made by the conservative party among mountaineers by way of reprobation of this practice, but Mr. Turner exaggerates just as extravagantly the beauty and value of solitary climbing. We can admire much of Mr. Turner's personal endowment, but his temperament excludes.him from the brotherhood of Stephen and Mummery and al) who have written about mountains, books which one can read among the noblest mountains without feeling as if display advertisements were being pasted on them. 1' |

Sir A. Quiller-Couch, in his Cambridge lectures on Dickens, said:—"Be the world of Dickens _^hat you will, he had the first demiurgic gift of entirely believing in what he created, v which was the first condition of a work of art. The artistic secret of Dickens's -world was accurately given by Mr. Saintsbury. It lies in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere. What ties this phantasmagoric world to ours and makes it universal with ours, coterminous, and so real? It is charity, tha inestimable gift of -charity thafc

Dickens flings over all* tilings as his magic mantle. That was the last gecret of Dickens, and that was what George Santayana meant when he wrote: 'If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens.' "

The first Western translation of The Bible was that of Saint Jerome, who, taking the Hebrew and Arabic text, rendered it into Latin, thus completing the Vulgate, which is still used in the Roman Church. The earlier English translations are from the Vulgate. John Wycliffe's translation was published about 1385, but it waa not destined to last, owing to rapid changes in the language. Tyndale and Coverdale, with others), made a new translation from the original Greek text of Erasmus. According to Professor Ctosse, this version coloured the complexion of subsequent English prose. It was published about 1535, almost simultaneously with the Book of Common Prayer of Cranmer and others. Thirty years later this version was revised, and known as the Bishop's Bible, and the points of doctrinal alteration grave tis& to the Douai Bible, which has literary merit not far short .of the King James version. In' 1611 the version still known as "authorised" was made by a number of divines led by Lancelot Andrews, Bishop of Winchester. "He was a natural-born orator, with an exquisite ear for the cadences of language. To this natural faculty of the Bishop's can be attributed much of the charm of the English in which the Bible was written. . . What he did was to tone it;, he overlooked and corrected all the tests submitted to him, and submitted only the best forms to survive." There have been others since, more correct and more scholarly, such as the Oxford Bible of 1870, but, as Hea-rn says, none of them have any_ claims to literary importance, and it is from the standpoint of pure literature that his survey is made.

A leading London second-hand bookseller recently declared that there has been, for the last IS or 20 years,y a greater demand for Irish books than for any others, and, remembering the great intellectual and literary revival in that' country, it was not difficult to understand it. He added that the demand for Welsh books came an easy second, which is a little surprising.

None of the stage versions of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" seems to have acquired abiding vahie or a distinct position in the history of British drama. This is rather strange, because one of the leading factors in Jane Austen's work is a perfect sense of dramatic progression and ironic comedy,. Hence she attracted critics who had the dramatic faculty well developed. Disraeli is said to have read "Pride and Prejudice" .seventeen times; and certainly we may conclude that the publisher, Cadell, who refused it without reading it, was minus all sense of humour—or sense j>i any sort. George Lewes would sooner, he said, have writ-? Sen this story than any of the Waverley Novels; and the creator of those novels j vied in praising Jane with Macaulay, who declared that she approaches Shakespeare nearer than any of our writers in the drawing of human character. !

'A recent "silly season" controversy raged round the question as to whether great writers can be teetotallers recalled the contention of M. Claude Berton, the French publicist, that brilliant geniuses are almost invariably big eaters. Among his own countrymen he cited Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and Zola a-s examples of great writers with unusually large appetites, and in this country Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens, and Macaulay, all of whom were hearty eaters. In the case of his supreme example, Balzac, he quoted the menu of a little dinner, entirely accounted for by the novelist alone, at tho Cafe Very. It included eight dozen oysters, 12 cutlets, a duckling, a pair of partridges, a sole, and a variety of sweets. Beside this, Handel, who used to order three dinners whenever he dined at a restaurant, appears quite abstemious.

Elijah' True writes in John 'OLondon's weekly that another attempt is to bo made to get English readers reconciled to the paper-covered book. Mr. Basil Blackwell, the well-known Oxford publisher and bookseller^ has the venture in hand. He will issue good books in the wiiy they ara issued in France, which leaves buyers to bind in cloth those they really desire to keep." But the trouble here (in England) is abiding and it is two-fold : first, that in our climate paper-bound volumes get very dirty, and so- are not readily stocked by booksellers; second, that the binding' habit has not been acquired by English people."