LITERARY COLUMN. LITERARY GOSSIP.

Evening Post, Volume LIX, Issue 11, 13 January 1900, Page 2 (Supplement)

LITERARY COLUMN. LITERARY GOSSIP.

The current number of the Echo, the maguzine of the Wesley Sunday School Young Men's Bible Class, is a creditable and readable production. Perhaps the most • striking article is that on- "The Ideal Young Man" as portrayed. by various lady correspondents. The New Zealand section of the Theosophical Society has started a monthly publication under the name of the "New Zealand Theosophical Magazine." The first number, a copy of which w« have received, contains several articles on theosophical subjects and a summary of news likely to interest theosophical readers. The editors are Mrs. Sara Draffin and Mr. C. W. Sandera. Presiding at a meeting of the Dante Society the other day the Poet Laureate (Alfred Austin) said the habitual reading of Dante, and of all poets that partake in any degree of the essential characteristics of Dante, was the best corrective and the safest protection against the confounding of tho Passing with the Permanent, which was the fundamental fault of contemporaneous criticism. Among the most entertaining books recently published in "Sir Algernon West's Recollections" which is full of good stories. S^ir Algernon is dijtcreet and kept no diaries while he was Mr. Gladstone's Secretary. But his recollections sometimes throw sidelights oil political events. For instance, when Mr. Gladstone was Cabinet - making in 1886, Sir Algernon says : — "Mr. Gladstone asked me whom I should propose as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I humbly suggested Chamberlain, hut he thought that the City would be terrified at his views of "ransom" while I maintained that a few weeks of official experience would soften the crudeness of his views. However, Dis aliter visum* and Sir William Harcourt became Chancellor, while Chamberlain, after refusing to be Fv*st Lord of the Admiralty, was relegated, unfortunately, to the Local Government Board." A few months afterwards, when the crash came, Mr. Chamberlain wrote to Sir Algernon West : 'What a pretty smash our Chief has made of it! It is not often given to a leader of a party twice to bring his followers to utter grief by an unexpected coup de main.' There can be no doubt that his depreciation of Mr. Chamberlain was a serious miscalculation on Mr. Gladstone's part. But there is a grim humour in the tale of Mr. Gladstone's fears lest the present Unionist Secretary for the Colonies should prove too Radical for the City. Mr. Adderley, the Socialist parson and the author of "Stephen Remarx" and "The New Floreat," two forcible polemics in the interests of humanity, has just written another plea for a section of his East End parishioners, in the shape of "Talitha Oumi." Mr. Adderley's particular intent in this moving little work is the amelioration of the lot of the factory girl. With his accustomed directness and humour he describes the ordinary life of these girls, contrasting it with that of the girl of the same age and comfortable surroundings to whom the book is addressed. Mr. Robert W. Chambers has completed a new romance entitled "The Cambric Mask," which i will be published early this year. It deals with the White Caps, and is said to resemble some of his earlier stories of the Maine woods. Mr. James M. Barries sequel to his "Sentimental Tommy" is to be called "Tommy and Grizei," and its opening chapters will appear ijn. the January Scribner. Grizei has become a woman and Tommy is oelebrated even as the story opens. The action takes place in London. Mr. Baring-Gould has nearly completed a volume of fairy stories to be entitled "The Crock of Gold." "A Corner of the West" is the title of the new novel by Edith Henrietta Fowler, the sister of the famous author of "A Double Thread" and "Concerning Isabel Carnaby.' The readers of London Truth were lately asked to name what they thought the best twenty books in the world. The following is the result of the vote, following the order of popularity: — The Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, "Paradise Lost," "Vanity Fair," Dante, "The Pilgrim's Progress," Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," "Ivanhoe," "Robinson Crusoe," Carlyle's "French Revolution," "The Imitation of Christ," BoswelFs "Life of Johnson," "Pickwick," Tennyson, "The Arabian Nights," Virgil, Moliere. "David Copperfield," "The Vicar of Wakefield." The Literary World describes how Mr. Coulson Kernahan has just been paid for poetry written in 1884. In an interview in "M.A.P." Mr. Kernahan made a humorous reference to a sonnet which appeaTed in the Graphic 15 years ago, and for which he did not receive the halfguinea sent by the editor. The reason was, he supposed, that it had been omitted by accident or lost in the post, and he was too modest to inform the editor of the fact. The editor of the Graphic has now sent Mr. Kernahan a cheque for a guinea, with a pleasant letter stating that on looking through the books it appears that Mr. Kernahao's receipt for the amount is missingt The- cheque is for double the amount at which the sonnet was originally assessed, and this, the editor explains, is for compound interest. A West Philadelphia girl, who is an enthusiastic autograph hunter, has recently added Rudyard Kipling to her collection at a cost of two dollars and a half (says the Philadelphia Record). From her experience it would seem that the English poet is not such an "absent-minded beggar" as he pictures Tommy Atkins to be. On the contrary, he believes in turning everything to a good account, and it is evidently this belief, rather than a mercenary motive, that prompts him to place a valuation of two dollars and a half on e\ery autograph he scribbles. It must not be inferred that he pockets the proceeds. The West Philadelphia girl sent a modest reauesb for an autograph,

enclosing a stamped and addressed envelope, as is her custom. In reply she received a printed slip from Mr. Kipling's secretary setting forth in brief that Mr. Kipling would be pleased to furnish -his autograph upon payment of two dollars and a half to any charity which the collector might prefer, a receipt for which should be immediately be sent to him. She donated the sum to the Children's Country Week Association, forwarded the receipt to Mr. Kipling, and the other day she received the autograph. Mr. Frank Norris has in contemplation a trilogy of novels which will symbolise American national life on a broad scale. The volumes (says the Bookman) will not be held together by a continuity of plot, but simply by the central symbol, American wheat, which he has selected as emblematic of American prosperity. The first volume will treat of wheat in the grain, and will portray life on the vast farming-lands of the ' San Joaquin Valley, a region 'which Mr. Norris revisited last summer expressly to collect material for his new work. *The octopus-like grasp of the Western railroads, adjusting their rates so as to absorb the giant share of the profits, in good years and bad alike, will form an important motif of the book. The 'second volume shows us the wheat brought to market, and will deal with the gigantic speculations of the Chicago wheat-pit The third deals with the final distribution of the wheat; the scene is shifted across tho Atlantic to some small Continental town in a year of famine, the aim being to show the far-reaching effects of our prosperity, as the wheat rolls eastward, in a vast, unbroken flood, filling the groaning ships and pouring across the ocean, to feed the mouths of hungry Europe.