LIBERS NOTE BOOK

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 25

LIBERS NOTE BOOK

One of the most brilliantly clever among latter-day Englishmen, Lord Birkenhead, avows himself a great admirer of Scott in his “Law, Life and Letters” (Hodder and Stoughton). Of the whole of Scott’s poems and novels Lord Birkenhead, “having always to consider and reconsider any extravagance at the bookseller’s,” has yet provided himself with first editions, which he reads throughout, so he says, once in every five years.” . . “Liber” himself re-reads bis “The Antiquary,” “tiny Mannering,” “Rob Roy,” “The Heart of Midlothian,” and “The Fortune of Nigel” every year or so, but confesses that his 48-volunie row of Sir Walter generally amasses dust on a top shelf, so far as most of the other stories arc concerned.

. . . I forgot to mention “Quenten Durward,”- which is not half so well known to present-day readers as it deserves to be, and yet it is very nearly as good as the best of Dumas.

. . . Apropos of Scott, I read the other day that Hugh Walpole, himself, in my opinion, one of our leading novelists, is a great Scott enthusiast, and has amassed a notable collection of manuscripts of “The Wizard of the North’s” writings. . . The-re was a day when Elinor Glyn made a big hit, mostly, I fear, with the prurient-mind-ed class of readers, with her “Three Weeks.” Alas, of her latest novel, “It,” the New York “Tinies,” generally a good judge of fiction, writes: “Never was tale more futilely, innocuously dull, vapid and generally unprofitable.” .... Vincente Blasco

Ibanez, the Spanish novelist who died a fortnight ago, must have made a big fortune by his stories, but his work always struck me as being specially suitable for reproduction in “movie” dramas. His “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” enjoyed a great vogue, but, save for the earlier South American chapters, it is, after all, but a piece of literary fiambovance, stagey to an extreme. . . . There was some good stuff in his “Blood and Sand,” but on the whole, he is far from being a really great novelist. . . . The death of Vicente Blasco Ibanez was responsible, in a certain New Zealand paper, for a sad mixing up of Cervantes and Le Sage. Cervantes, whose “Don Quixote,” is, I fear, more talked about than read, was unquestionably Spain’s most notable writer, but to couple the author of “Gil Blas” as “those two great Spanish novelists,” was a sad sub-editorial bloomer. For “Gil Blas,” that most amusing of picaresque novels was the production of Le Sage, a brcnchman, and never a.Spaniard at all. . . . Spain can boast of Cervantes, the novelist; of Calderon, the dramatist, and Camoens, the author of “The Lusiad,” but Le Sage hailed from the land which lies north, not south of the Pyrenees. Apparently we are to have a Bronte revival this vear. Miss Romer Wilson, who wrote a very promising first novel, “The Death of Society,” is a Yorkshire native, and is writing a new life of that unhappy genius, Emily Bronte. . “Haworth Parsonage,” a picture of the Bronte family by Isabel C. Clark, has just been published by Hutchinson and Co., and a new edition of “Wuthering Heights,” with an inti oduction bv Valentine Dobree has been issued f>v Alfred Knopf who. after establishing a flourishing book publishing business in New York, has now started publishing in London. . . All of us who know children, more particularly how they are apt to set forth their desires, and hopes, as to what Santa Claus may bring them, will appreciate what, in Mr. A. A. latest book, “Now We Are Six, runs as to the Christmas wants of bad King John .in the notice he posted on his chimney top: - “I want some crackers. And I want some candy: I think a box of chocolates Would come in handy; I don't mind oranges, I do like nuts! And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife That really cuts. And, oh 1 Father Christmas, it you love me at all, .Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball!” ‘■Forget about the crackers, And forget about <he candy; I'm sure a box of chocolates Would never come in handy; I don't like oranges, I don’t want nuts. And I have got a pocket-knife That almost cuts. But, oli! Father Christmas, if you love me at all. Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball But there was nothing in his stocking for King John. King John,-.you_ see, was a verv wicked monarch and Santa Claus has’a trick of ignoring naughty people.