LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22343, 5 March 1938, Page 20

LITERARY GOSSIP.

•- ■ ■ ♦ A letter written by Charles jygfc* ens, in which he protested trespassers in his grounds at G*f« Hill Place. Higham, near Rochester and against rubbish being thrown in the shrubbery there, has discovered at Gillingham, Kent It is addressed to Mr William Stodter Trood —to whom Dickens refers as "Mr Strood" —landlord of the FaJ. staff Inn, which stands directly onposite Gad's Hill Place. r The letter was found by Mrs I» Ballard, of Napier road, Giffing. ham, Mr Trood's great-graad-daughter, while she was searching through an old family chest. It was enclosed in an envelope bearing the Dickens monogram embossed «& blue. *\^ The text of the letter, dated May 5, 1858. from Tavistock House. Tavistock square. Lankan W.C., is as follows: *

] Mr Charles Dickens be?s Mr Strood !> to be so good as lt> give directions Wat no rubbish or refuse from the FalstaS be thrown into the shrubbery of Gads Hill Place. Mr Dickens also hopesttet Mr Strocd will advise his customers I not to treSDass on that ground! in ©>. ing from the Falstaff to the village. ! He wishes very earnestly to live oa good terms with his neighbours of all degrees: and he hopes that they foam it. and will not feel disinclined to respect his property. He is sure that Mr Strood can have no desire not to do what is obliging and right and he therefore addresses this note to Mr Strood in good will and good htnsoat. Found with the letter was one of Dickens's visiting cards, on which was written a message to Mr Trood —the name being given correctly this time: "Mr Charles Dickens begs Mr Trood to send 2 Dozen Pints of Bottled Stout to Mrs Marsh and enter them in Mr Dickens' Book." " Efforts have been made during the last few months by certain literary agents to induce a few selected authors to make separate contracts,. for the publication of their work in"* Australia and New Zealand, and to. exclude these markets from their English contracts, according to i letter from Mr F. D. Sanders, secretary of the Publishers' Association of Great Britain and Ireland, in the latest issue of the "Author." This practice, which would lead to the printing of many of the more important books in Australia instead of in England to supply the Com--monwealth and New Zealand market, is considered by Mr Sanders to be undesirable, if a long view of the author's interest is taken. He argues that it would compel New Zealand booksellers to depend* on Australia for their supplies of important new books. "It is weH known that New Zealand strongly resents being treated as an appendage of Australia," he adds.

A letter from the Literary Supple* ment of "The Times"': : Bourdillon and Folooskil Sir,—One of * the most suggestive poems of Francis William BourdiDoa (1852-1221) are certainly the verses:— The night has a thousand eyes, - And the day but one: Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes. And the heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is dene. -—3 Having translated these lines into ths • Czech language, I know them well; and so I was astonished when I got a copy of the Slovene art review. Volume 11, No. 3-4. Liubliana, 1332 F where I found, on page 61. a nearly literal translation of Bourdillon's poem by Fr. Tominec, but the authorship being attributed to the Russian poet lakov Petrovitch Polonskii (1319-1898). To solve this little mystery. I looked at once through the poems of Polonskii "Stikhotvorenia," S. Peterbourg (1896), and I found there, Volume 11, page 137, a Russian translation, done well enough, of our poem, bearing the title "Iz Burdilena"—i.e. "From Bourdillon'* —and with the epigraph "The night has thousand eyes." The poem is there reprinted in a section of Polonskii's verses from the years 1870-75. It is curious to see that an older poet who, at that time, was already something like a Russian classic did translate the verses of a writer so much younger. The Slovene translator, charmed by the Russian verses but unable to solve the mysterious indication of the author's name in its transcription after the Russian manner, let Polonskii's title and his epigraph away, and so the poem appeared in the Slovene review as a translation of a Russian poem. Habent sua fata carmina. —Otto F. Babler. Oloinouc, Czechoslovakia.

" John Bakeless, who wrote '"Chris- . topher Marlowe: The Man and His ! Time," has been making a census of all known copies of all Marlowe's plays and has traced the history of each. He has found that, although only three copies of "Dido, Queen of Carthage" are now known to be in existence—one in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, one in the Huntington Library in California, and one in the Bodleian Library. Oxford—still a fourth copy was sold at auction in New York in 1860 for 25 cents. No record of the purchaser was kept and there is no possible way of tracing it. The Huntington copy, the only one that has been on the rare-book market in a century, sold for 12,900 dollars. The March issue of the '•Monocle" carries a striking article by Mr J. D. McMillan on "A Policy for Private Enterprise." The fiction of the magazine exhibits strong contrasts: one short story is a masterpiece reprinted from Thomas Hardy, another bears the brilliant name of A. J. Cronin. Regular departments, such as business, books, and films, are well up to date; and pictorially the number is handsome.—Every:.* man's Publications, Ltd.: 1/-. Among novels received at the Canterbury Public Library, during the last week, reports the librarian, are "Northwest Passage," by Kenneth Roberts, a novel of eighteenth century American historv; "The Brothers." a short story by H. G. Wells, and "Wheel of Fortune," a translation from the Italian of Alberto Moravia. Another book by Ernestine Hill, who wrote "Water into Gold/" a history of the MiJdura district, is "The Great Australian Loneliness." an account of a journey round the continent. In "Hollywood through the Back Door," E. Nils Holstius has described his pursuit of recognition as a scenario-writer iri Hollywood; and S. P. B. Mais, the well-known writer of the English countryside, has produced his autobiography in "All the Days of My Life"