LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 74, 24 September 1927, Page 21

LITERARY NOTES

. At a luncheon party in London recently Mr. Augustine Birrell said that some years ago he picked up a first edition of Gray's Elegy for 2s 6d, sold it for £350, and suffered the chagrin of seeing it sold to America for £500, and later sold again for £1000.

The Duke and Duchess of York's tour will be described by Mr. Taylor Darbyshire, who accompanied them as representative of the Australian Press Association. Mr. Darbyshiro is Editor in Chief of the Australasian Press Association in London. He was formerly active and well known in Australia theatrical circles. The book will be published by Edward Arnold. It acquires historic significance from the opening of the Commonwealth Parliament at Canberra.

An English translation of the memoirs and documents left by Prince Max of Baden, the last Chancellor of tho German Empire, has just been published. Tho book made a stir in Germany on account of its frankness about what wont on around Kaiser William in the last phases of the war. "What is all this nervousness I find in Berlin," ho asked at a meeting of his Ministers, to which he came from the front. President Ebert comes into Prince Max's narrative, as saying, "I have lost two sons for the sake of this Reich." To write sixty novels is truly "some feat" (says a writer in the "Harrap Mercury"), and I wonder whether Mr. Jefferson Farjeon is hoping to emulate this achievement of his father's. Benjamin- L. Parjeon went as a youth to Australia in the early gold-rush days and was later the foundor of tho first daily newspaper in New Zealand. It was at the special invitation of Charles Dickens that he returned to England to write novels, and his books were widely read at the end of last century. His .son Jefferson is still best known as the author of that very successful play, "No. 17," and his subsequent books and plays have all been, of the detective class. ■ ' '

John "Wesley went to America in 1735, and stayed there until 1738, wheu he returned to England. Those years are treated like the others in most biographies of him, but a novelist, Miss Marie Conway Oemler, thinks they should be treated quite differently. She treats them differently in a novel, "The Holy Lover," which she has done for Heinemann. Her view is that AVesley's visit to America was perhaps the most important event in his life, because it was then he fell in love. Her study of him is that of a man struggling against the desire for human happiness which love meant, in order to carry out the religious task to which he was dedicated.