PERSONAL NOTES.

— Miss Margaret Benson, daughter of the late Archbishop of ( Canterbury, is an Egyptologist of much energy and some note. With another lady she has been engaged in excavations at Karnak.

— As a young man M. Zola was glad to earn 20f a week as an assistant in a Paris bookshop. To-day the famous novelist receives 25,0Q0f for the serial rights alone of a story, and his income is at least a quarter of a million francs (£10,000) a year.

— Lord Rosebery is one of the few men who can claim to have realised the greatest ambitions of their lives. He married the wealthiest heiress in England, owned a winner of the Derby, and has been Prime Minister ; and these are the three objects on which he is said to have set his heart even when he was wearing an Eton jacket.

— Mr Phil May's brilliant sketches, in spite of their appearance of ease, and haste, are the results of much labour and painstaking. They are first drawn with the most elaborate detail, and then all but the absolutely essential lines are rubbed ' out, leaving the slight sketches that we see, every line of which is a " stroke of genius."

— Lord Lathom, the Queen's Chamberlain, recently deceased, had never quite recovered from the shook of the tragic death of his wife exactly 12 months ago. Ho was an examplar of the very beet type of the English grand seigneur. Court official, politician, country gentleman, and raconteur, he touched life on many sides, and adorned every one. In him also freemasonory loses one of its most distinguished and enthusiastic adherents.

— Lord Iveagh is oue of the richest men in England. He was the youngest of three brothers, but managed to acquire the whole of the family brewing business before it became a company ; its almost incredible prosperity since is a matter of history. Lord Iveagh is a man of unassuming demeanour, but he lias a huge house in Grosvenor Place. He owues Sloven den, where the late Maharajah Dhuloep Singh used to live. His sons are all famous oarsmen.

— Sir George Baden-Powell, whoso death has just been announced, had, at 50 years of age, a highly promising future as a politician and an administrator. A man of large views, who had had an experience of life m every quarter of the globe, he played an active part in the House of Commons, where he represented since 1885 the Kirkdale Division of Liverpool — and on colonial subjects he was an authority. Sir George waß a great yachtsman. Recently ha had Dr Nansen as a passenger, and it was he who introduced the great traveller to some of the most prominent of English statesmen. — Mr Michael Maybrick, who, as "Stephen Adams," has endeared himself to the songloving world, did not cultivate his talent for composition till some time after his appearance as a singer. Then "Nancy Lee," "The Midshipmite," and many other popular favourites followed each other in quick succession. It is not generally remembered that Mr Maybrick was first distinguished as a musician, and was an organist at the parish church of his native city of Liverpool at the ago of 14-.

— Lord Rosebery's return to public life — although it may almost be said to have been accidental — has produced an almost startling effect upon the opinion of both political parties. In a moment, and without any apparent effort on his part, he has taken his place by common consent as one of the foremost citizens of our couutry. Hie two years of almost absolute retirement from public affairs have been suddenly effaced from the recollection of the public, and his utterances are everywhere treated as being second in importance to those of no other statesman of the day, not even excluding the Prime Minister. — Speaker.

— When the late Prince Bismarck was in London, in 1843, he was invited to visit a famous brewery, and his hosts, having hoard of his reputation as a beer-drinker of cjeat prowoss, presented to him an enormous tankard of old ale, in the confident expectation that he would be obliged to admit himself vanquished by it. " I seized the tankard," Bismarck told Sir Charles Dilke, who relates the story. " and I thought of my country and drank to Prussia, and tilted it till it was empty. Then I thanked my entertainers — courteously, I hope — and succeeded in making my way safely as far as London Bridge. There I sat down in one of the stone recesses, and for hours the great bridge went round and round me."

— It is the City of London now that claims a kinship with the Sirdar. He is, through his family, closely associated with the city and its guilds. His grandfather was a London merchant, and was admitted to the freedom of the, Cloth-workers' Company in March, 1791. Mr Henry Kitchener, the father of the present : Sirdar, never availed himself of the right to [•take 'up the freedom of the guild by patrimony, and consequently Lord ' Kitchener cannot claim to be "free born." His uncle, Mr Robinson John kitchener, was the master of the company in 1864-, and his arms are now to be seen displayed to advantage in the interesting old home of the guild in Mincing Lane. — Dr A. K. H. Boyd, known to the world of readers as " A. K. H. 8.," is one of the few writers who drifted from the law into the church, and later into letters. At St. Andrew's, to which he has devoted three of his many boc&s, the venerable parson and writer is beloved by all for hi« courtesy and charity. As come evidence of vitality — though his books are proof of this — Mr Boyd took to himself a wife last year, although he had passed the allotted span by three years. Thousands who know nothing personally of "A. K. H. B ," have a very tender place in their affections for the "country parson" whose recreations and moialisings have charmed them so often.

— It was Josh Billings, unless we are mistaken, who, having boasted one day that he could set auy audience in a roar, had one provided for him from whom he could not elicit the faintest smile. It was an audience of mutes. Mark Twain has been having a similar experience, according to a paragraph which appears in the New York Critic. Commenting on Mark Twain's recent speech in English to a German audience in Vienna, in which the lecturer sounded the tocsin for universal peace, and said that the Tsar had convinced him that it was possible to put a stop to war, the Critic remarks :_ "The speech was not interpreted to the audience, because the Government representative did not consider it safe in German. It was only safe in English, because no one understood what the gentleman from America was talking about. It is melancholy to think of all the good things that were wasted upon that unresponsive German audience."

—Mr Richard Barry O'Brien, assistanteditor of the Speaker, and author of the newly-published "Life of Mr Parnell," which has attracted bo much attention, is a barrister occupying chambers in Lincoln's Inn, London, but is much more widely known in connection with literature than with law. He was one of the founders of the London Irish Literary Society, and he has been a voluminous writer on Irish, subjects for some 20 years past.

Mr Parjiell wanted to make him an, M.P., 1 but he declined, his tastes favouring'the quiet and calm of the study. At the time of the^ split in the Irish party, Mr O'Brien sided witli Mr Parnell, and there^is a tradition, possibly I a legend, that he composed the stirring manifestoes that bore the signature of Mr Parnell during that stormy period. The notice of Parnoll in the "Dictionary of National Biography" was largely the product of Mr | O'Brien's pen. — Although Lord Curzon's appointment came as a general surprise, it appears from « statement in his Derby speech that he himself had conceived the idea 11 years ago. Recalling that Government House, Calcutta, was built by Lord Wellesley on the ground plan of House, in Derbyshire, he remarked that the fact of that remembrance first turned his thoughts to the question of the government of India, and when he left the doors of Government House, in Calcutta, on, the first and only occasion on which he visited it, in 1887, it made him feel that Borne day; if fate were propitious, and he were held deserving, he would like to exchange Kedleßton in England for Kedleeton in India. Lord and Lady Curzon were . td leave England on December 6 for India. The new Viceroy has made all his appointments now. Mr Lawrence,, who goes out as private secretary, is a very well-known Indian official, who inaugurated and carried out a great land scheme in his department in' India; he was well known to the present Duke of Bedford when he was on Lord Dufferin'e staff, and~when he returned from India some 18 monthß Ago the Duke made him agent and manager of his property, in the country. He has given that up to go back with' Lord Curson, who was also a friend of his at Baliiol. Captain Everard Baring (Lord Revelstoko'ff brother), Lord Suffolk, Lord Bolgrave, and Lord Frederick Blackwood are to be some of his A.D.C.'s. When bidding good-byo to his Parliamentary constituents at SouthpoTt — whom he has represented for the last 12_year3 — Lord Curzon spoke of his work in the House of Commons, and hiß regret at leaving it. Referring to the duties of a Viceroy of India, he said he was not gojnjr to bo a " talking viceroy." Administration, and not speechmakinjr. was the principal qualification, and the test of this was not eloquence but efficiency.