LITERARY NOTES-

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16209, 11 May 1918, Page 7

LITERARY NOTES-

From Messrs Macmillan comes the interesting announcement that they have in the press, and are to publish in the early spring, a volume of "Occasional Addresses" of a non-political character "by Mr Asquith. Hitherto, as was the oase with most of his predecessors in the office of Prime Minister, Mr Asquith's writings have teen almost exclusively devoted to the discussion of political topics, but now, in going outside this highly controversial region, he is following in the footsteps of a few of the Victorian leaders. At least four Prim© Ministers in Queen Victoria's reign had a decided bent for literature—Lord John Russell, Mr Gladstone, the Earl of Betu constield, and Lord Rosebery—but only one of them —BeaconsfieJd —aspired to fame as a novelist-.

The 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature bas been awarded to Dr. K. Gjellerup, the distinguished Danish author. Two of his best-known works, "The Pilgrim Kamanita" and "Minna," are published by Heinemann.

Among the minor consequences of the shortage of paper in Britain has been the serious curtailment in the issue of booksellers' catalogues, a species of publication which, as Mr Augustine Birrell has somewhere, said, always provides "very pretty reading." Much Jjas been written, especially of late, of the kind of literature* affected by the men in the trenches, and heroic tales are told of soldiers reading right through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" ; but it is more interesting still to learn that catalogues are a solaoe to not a few ma 114 hers of the Expeditionary Force." Messrs Sotheran had to send out an intimation to their customers, that under the rule prohibiting the circulation of catalogues they are obliged to withhold t-ha Catalogue of Publications of Learned Societies and other works on Chemistry, Meteorology, Airmanship, Naval and General Engineering, Mining Physics, and the exact sciences generally, including the libraries of the lat© Lord Justice Stirling, F.R.S., George Rennio, F.R.S., and Samuel Roberts, F.R.S. It would be incredible, if it were not true (an indignant contributor to the "Westminster Gazette" • remarks), that while unlimited paper is apparently still available for cheap novels, and popular and frivolous publications of all sorts, ifc should be denied for a publication of this kind, which is all but indispensablo to engineers and men of science, and which has a direct bearing on the scientific side of war-work.

A volume of reminiscences, which Messrs Collins have in the press, to bo lcoked forward to, which should bo specially interesting, is that which Mrs Humphry Ward has prepared under the title "A "Writer's Recollections." As the translator of Amifci's "Journal Int'me" —upon which Mrs Ward's uncle, Matthew Arnold, based his well-known article now included in the second series of "Essays in Criticism" —and as a keen student of Spanish "literature and histoiy, a study which found an outkv in numerous articles on Spanish subjects in Dr. Smith's "Di-tionarv of Christian B'ographv," Mrs Humphry Ward first showed the literary bent noticeable in all the members of the Arnold family but it is by her novels that she has been chiefly known in later years.