LITERARY NOTES.

Miss Olive Schreiner's promised new novel is to be a study in the comparative ethica of men's treatment of men and their treatment of women.

Miss Catherine Tynan, the Irish poetess and writer, has lately settled in London. She is shortly about to bring out a volume of brief storie3, and her work is as much appreciated in America as at Home. VjjMr Stanley's new book will be called "My Dark Companions, and Their Strange Stories," and will consist of legends told round the camp fire during 17 years' travel in the Dark Continent.

The Marquis of Dufierin is about to bring out a volume of poems by his mother (Lady DufEerin, who a few months before her death

But it is said that so far all such offers have been " declined with thanks."

The late Mr J. A. Symonds has appointed as his literary executor his friend Mr Horatio Brown, of Venice. The task will be no sinecure, for Mr Symonds has left behind him, we believe, a large quantity of unpublished work. Mr Brown's own books on Venice, and his researches in the Venetian archives on behalf of the British Government, are well known, and it would be difficult to suggest any man so well fitted as he, both by sympathy of tastes and studies and by long personal intimacy, to carry out Mr Symonds's literary bequests.

Regarding the tradition or prejudice that the British people do not buy books while the Americans do, Mr Besant has been unable to find any solid foundation for it. On the contrary, he puts the boot on the other leg. Barring dime novels, Americans do not buy, he is convinced, in anything like the same porportion as our own people. An American publisher thinks a sale of 5000 copies indicates a very successful novel, the average successful one meaning about 2000.£ Now with us a very popular eix-shilling book easily runs into tens of thousands.

Mr Charles Ashton, of Dmas Mawddwy, North Wales, is performing a useful but laborious task for his compatriots. This is nothing less than a complete bibliography of Welsh books, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers, including books about Wales in other languages. He intends to give the title-page in full, with an added note stating the size, number of pages, and biographical details. Mr Ashton is appealing to all who own Welsh books to send him a list of short titles, in order that he may mark those about which he desires fuller information. Nine thousand entries have already been made.

When Samson fell among the Philistines they allowed death to end the feud. Their modern representatives, by aid of the resources of nineteenth-century progress, are able to carry torture a stage further; and if they cannot get the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford to write a man's biography, they call on one of their fellows to publish his private lettere. A Eaboo book of etiquette, published some time ago, gave the rule " never read a friend's letters that you see lying open." Our English gentlemen laughed at the idea that the rule was necesssary ; but surely it is a worse crime to take the letters of a dead friend and, as it were, read them aloud to a miscellaneous public. Yet Mr George Eussell is going to publish the confidential letters which Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother I Truly the tender mercies of the Philistines are cruel.