SCOTT AND BALZAC.

Evening Post, Volume LXX, Issue 37, 12 August 1905, Page 11

SCOTT AND BALZAC.

x o "Claudius Clear," of the British Weekly, writing _ eloquently of Edinburgh, laments that perhaps no writer either in poetry or in prose has Tendered fitly or adequately its romance. But the Scott Monument stira him deeply, and from contemplation of this magnificent memorial ho' passes to contemplation of the magnificent life it reminds us of. " What -a life -that was," 'he exclaims, " and . . . what a structure is that which Scott has left us! It is a great mansion with the sunlight streaming in the windows. It ia a house where every door is open, and where there is nothing on which a pure woman may not look. -A great French critic compares tho achievement -of Balzac — the only man to be named with Scott — to a Cathedral of the middle ages. This | cathedral sadly meeds a guide. He should know all about that vast'labyrinthine edifice La C'omedie Humaine, and about the history of the architect; but must not tell all .he knows to the untutored public. He may show them the Eugenia Grandet Shrine, and Modesto ■Mignon's little chapel, and the imagnificent view from the tower of Serapnitils Sei-aphita, but >ho should be'eilent about many grotesques in the huge pile, about the window with tho legend of VautrLi, the skeleton built up in the walls of .ths chapel of La Grande Breteche, and tlio crypts haunted by ghosts of goldeneyed girls dead in their sins." The talk turned on Australian literature, and the enthusiast in the work of his fellow-countrymen, turning to another Australian for support, asked, with a glowing face, "What do you think of Adams's new oook, eh?" The other looked at him blankly for a sec ond. Then he replied with scorn, "Adams never made a book. It's n. sweep. " A husband camo home one evening and found a note left for him by his ivife. Carelessly he opened it, but as he read his face blanched. "Heavens I" he exclaimed, "how could this have happened so suddenly?" And, snatching his hat and coat, ho rushed to a hospital which was near his home. '"1 >vant to see my wife, Mrs. Brown, at once," he said to the head nurse, "bofore she goes under the ether. Pleaso tako my message to. her at once." "Mrs. Brown V' echoed the nurse ; "there is no Airs. Brown here." "Then to which hospital has she gone?" asked the distracted husband ; "I found this note from her when I came home," and he banded the note to the nurse, who read ; "Dear Husband — '"1 have gone to havo my kimono cut out. Belle." A remarkable operation has just been performed at Dortmund, in Prussia. A young man, stabbed through the heart, was given only two hours to live, whon Dr. Pritmann, opening his side, displaced a rib to get ut the heart. An assistant put his finger in tho wound, and the doctor sewed up the wound round the finger so successfully that tho man shortly afterwards left the hospital as if nothing had happened.