LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 34, 8 August 1925, Page 17

LITERARY NOTES

Mr. A. C. Benson, the author, left an estate valued at £112,000. In his will he directs that those of his diaries which contain intimate details of living persons shall be destroyed, and that his other diaries shall be sealed up for fifty years.

Jack London, at his death, left an incomplete story of Japan called "Cherry." The MS. was written as the outcome.of a visit to Japan with Mrs. London, and the widow has now completed the story. It is being published by Mills and Boon.

Of Miss Amy Lowell, who died in America shortly after, the publication of her life of Keats, the "London Mercury" says: "Because she smoked cigars, legend, in England imputed to her an excessive masculinity. This was quite wrong. She was a short, substantially built lady, elightly like Queen Victoria, excitable, and with a rapid high-pitch-ed voice. '

When Mr. A. S. M.. Hutchinson took for the title of his new novel "The Increasing Purpose," it was pointed out that the American novelist James Lane Allen had already used the title. Mr. Hutchinson has resolved to call his new book "One Increasing Purpose." . This makes the title a quotation rather than an allusion to Tennyson'a familiar lines in "Locksloy Hall: —

Yet I doubt not through the ages one

increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of, men are widened with the process or the suns.

Mrs. Frank Russell describe* Victorian dinners in her "Fragments of Auld Lang Syne :—Victorian dinners were very long, 'usually lasting about two hours. The number of courses was endless. Fruit was almost prohibitive in price; grapes were at least 30s per lb, pineapples at least £2 apiece. A dish of bananas—not always procurable—cost over-£2. Savouries had not yet conio into fashion, and when first they appeared on the menus ladies were not supposed to partake.of them for fear of being thought fast!

Mr. Harry Purniss tells of Frank Lockwood, ■ the witty lawyer,, in "The Two Pins Club" :—On one occasion Lockwood appeared before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge in a dog ense. Lord Coleridge slept rather ninra soundly than usual when Lockwood wus cross-examining a witness ns. to the behaviour-of doga at shows. Rather annoyed, counsel, raising

his voice, said sternly: "Tell me, sir, is it your experience "that dogs are apt to get sleepy after they have been a long time on the bench?" He had the Judge's attention during the rest of the healing.

Sir Hall Came is writing a "Life .of Christ," He ha* been gathering material in the Holy Land for his work.

Duckworth 1* promise a volume of tw&tlJM: Mi lit*. Zwiaad iogtu-

siona by Mr. Seymour Hicks, who, ramembering a popular London review, calls it "Hullo Australia."

Madame Melba'a reminiscences are to be published 'by Mr. Thornton ButterMr. Padraio Colum, the Irish poet and fairy-tale writer, now lives in America, but his friends on this side of the Atlantic do not forget him. "A.E.," who is Mr. George W. Russell, another Irishman of letters, dedicates !o him a book which he has appearing with Macmillan. It is a volume of poems, and it has the title "Voices of the Stones," as in the dedicatory poem: I made these verses in a rocky land, And I have named them Voices of the ' Stones. Only the humble stones have, kept Their morning stai-riness of purity Immutable. Being unfallcu Uiey breathe Only unfallen life. . * .

It is being asked in London ■who will •write the biographies of Lord Curzon, Lord Leverhulme, and of that eminent painter, John-S. Sargent. The names of Mr. Oswald Mosley, who married Lady Cynthia Curzou, and of Lord Birk<;nhead are mentioned in relation to tie Curzon memoir. The biographer of Lord Leverhulme will most likely be someone who has been associated with Irs romantic life-story. The Sargent book obviously calls for a writer with a full knowledge both of the artist and his art:.

Mr. J. A. Spender, whose last book was the biography of Campbell-Banner-man, has' now had published "Public Life." ' It is a study attained through personal types, of democracy and Parliament, showing the aims of those who have been prominent in the modern march of English progress, and it contrasts thorn with men of Continental and American, fame, ■ Bismarck or Cjemfiticeau, Abraham Lincoln, or Poincaro Special attention is given by Mr. Spender to modern newspaper changes in relation to Parliament, and he discusses the subject with inside knowledge.