LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 101, 28 April 1917, Page 16

LITERARY NOTES

The oldest Bible manuscripts now in existence date from about 300 to 450 A.D., and show us' the Bible as it existed soon after apostolic days. All of the earlier manuscripts were either' lost or destroyed in the terrible persecutions which were directed not only against the Christians but against their treasured sacred writings, their enemies thus hoping to stamp out even the slightest traces of Christianity. The three oldest manuscripts now in existence are known as the Sinaitic, the Alexandrian and the Vatican manuscripts. The Sinaitic was found by the eminent Bible scholar, Tischendorf, in a convent oa Mount Sinai in 1844. It contains the Septuagint, other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete and some of the apocryphal books.

In seeking to explain the popularity of the American novel in England, The Times quoted a publisher who attributed some of the present popularity of the American story to a keener light-hearted-ness Hian may be found in the majority of English novels of to-day. "IfJ American popular literature excels by reason of its liglit-heartedn?£6, it does well," says the Boston Transcript, replying to The Times comment. "There is material for thought in the '.expression.' Let us be glad that Britain likes the snap of Joy in our popular productioaj,. U SPSS*

out of life. No doubt the teeming British millions like also the spice of democracy that is in our fiction—the absence of social distinctions arid of the eternal snobbery of the patronage ot an upper class."

A writer in the Westminster Gazette recalls the fact that Burns' once displayed his sympathy for France in a very practical manner As an Exciseman he captured a smuggling vessel off the Solway coast; and at the sale of. its equipment he purchased four carronades, which, though he was a poor man, he despatched to the French Revolutionary Government with a message of sympathy with their cause. The guns, however, did riot reach their destination, for war was already in the air, and the English Government intercepted them at Dover.

The explanation of Kipling's method— or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the beginning of his method—given in the late DLxon Scott's " Men of Letters," has been admired for. its essential truth, no less than for its dash of malice. "Like Mr. Shaw's affectation of ferocity, like Mr. Maurice Hewlett's early hedtics, most of Kipling's fine work (says Mr. Scott) was. just the artist's human retort to that intolerable toleTance with which the workers, the doers, fighters, men of action, regard his anaemic indoor trade. It was Beetle's way of enforcing respect at "Westward Ho!" It was young Kipling's way of adjusting things at Simla. He would prove that ink can be thicker than blood, and the pen even more daring than the sword; and that a certain small, spectacled sub-editor fond of poetry was not quite the innocent lamb that he looked. And so he licked up tales in the bazaars and the barracks, and nebulously Bret Hartened them and pointed them with Poe; and then WTote them out, with infinite cunning, in; a hand like an indifferent drawl. One of the most effective ways of out-Heroding Herod is to yawn wearily when..the head is brought in. Mr. Kipling's yawn was a masterpiece. His make-up was perfect, the deception complete. The mess-rooms were duly impressed. ..."

Mr. Joseph Keating lias become a prosperous novelist and playwright, but popularity was a long time reaching him. In "My Struggle for Life," just published, he pictures a fight almost as hard and painful as George Gissing's. "By the Easter of 1911 my poverty had reached its cruellest stage, and I wondered whether it was worth while trying to exist at all. For nearly ten years I had been writing, always writing, and always against time, in order to buy food and shelter, and that frightful task seemed to have stunned my inspiration. I felt as if, for ten years, a steam roller had been passing and re-passing over my brain, flattening out its ideas in the same way as the stones of a road were crushed to a smooth surface.", Soon, afterwards his novels began to make their way with the reading public.