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Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20215, 18 April 1931, Page 13

The new Director and Principal Lib' rarian of the British Museupa, in room of Sir Frederic Kenyon, is Br. George Francis' Hill, C.8., who has been Keeper of the Department of Going and Medals since 1013. Dr. Hill was born in India in .1867, and Entered the Museum as assistant when he was 30. He was educated at University School and tJniver* sity College, London, and Morton,' Oxford, and is an honorary doctor of Manchester ' and Edinburgh tTniversities., From 1898 to 1912 he edited the "Journal of Hellenic Studies," and since 3912 he has been editor of the "Numismatic Chronicle." "Punch" hailed his appointment in following lines (by Mr Arundell Esdaile, of the Museum): : jParturit, en! Brit, Mus.; nascatur ut egregius Mons.

The hills in their travail, with groaning and'fuss, Once bore, we all know, a 'ridicnlut MuS'; Buf here is a birth more miraculous still. When the Mus.- (Brit.) conceives ana • produces a HUL

In his preface to "Pages of English I*rose, 1390-1930," Sir Arthur QuillorCouch defends what is often called, With a smack of contempt in the alliteration, the "purple patch":

■ The "purple patch'' ; has become anathema. . What is the fflfcttw with thiie Tyrian purpla? . . . Literature, after nil, is nwraora-ble speech: just that and no more (as I am always preaching at Cambridge to .those who honour me as listeners), words vorthy to be stored up in memory, writing, print, lor our mental or spiritual improvement, language being the divinest of human gifts and apart from music, and the pictorial 9its the one medium, more plastic than either, of expressing his deepest thoughts and emotions. In this simple; oonception nio* distinctions—definitions, for . instance, of the "proper" limits between poetry and prose—simply disappear,' It, suffices that something hae been e&ld whish in itself or for its • manner our fellows hold worthy m I record, for their good. And in preotxo# : literature, even prose literature, will be I found. much'more on the side of the purple patch than most people nowadays assume., Thiittydides sewed these patchea on to Jus narrative .as a matter of course; he gave Petioles' famous oration, m hearers remam< he-red it or as he dressed it up, as confidently aa any historian of the American Civil War will include Lincoln's Gettysburg oration. Plato—«« in his, fable of the Sods in Procession—habitually uses high poetwal prose; and parable u when bis philosophy shade* off into the deeper mysUme*. Cieero draped himself in such purple: so, xn tne line of our own prose In their turn _a*w on. fnven occasion, did Donne, Milton, Browne, Berkeley, Gibbon,. Jo)m«oO, Pe Qmncey, Hazlitt,. Jlacaulay-—to come no neater., Nsy, if we go right back (I have contended), ,jt ft arguable that Pro»e, was be*n In the purple"; that nine-tenth* of' the spo»ch« making in the "Iliad" itwflf, for example], is ihetorio stmuß into hsMunstefffc