IN BOOKLAND

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 10 September 1927, Page 18

IN BOOKLAND

Mr A. S. Collins gives some interesting particulars of authors earnings in Ins “Authorship an the Days of Johnson.” Pope received £S,(JO for his translation of Homer, Tnompson £l,0(JO for “Tne Seasons,” and Atenside A; 120 for his first )>ook, “The Pleasures oi Imagination.” Young was paid 220 guineas for his “Night Thoughts”; Goldsmith received only 20 guineas tor “The Traveller,” 60 guineas for his immortal "Vicar,” but as mu. li as 800 guineas for the compilation called “rlistory of Animated .vature.” Feilding drew less than .£2OO irom “Joseph Andrews, ’ £<oo from “Tom Jones,” and £I,OOO from

“Amelia.” Hums received £3,400 tor nis “History ol England”; Robertson £4,0./0 for ins “C.iarles V.” Cleiand sou nis “.Memories of a Woman of .Pleasure” lor 20 guineas, hut Griffiths his publisher, made a profit of £IO,OO arom it. Hannah More is said to have tamed £30,000 from her works. iii those days money bought at least twire as much as it buys to-da*.

To write sixty no.els is truly “some feat ’ tisays a writer in the “Harrap ...ercuiv j, and i wonder whether _\lr Je. erson ear,eon is hoping to emulate t is a hie.ment of his father’s. Benjamin i.. bar.,eon went as a youth to Aust. alia imthe early gold-rush days and was later the founder of the first daily newspaper in New Zealand. It was at a special invitation of Charles Miiokems that he returned to England to write novels, and his books were widely , read at the end of last century, ilis son Jefferson is still best known as the autror of that very successful play, “No 17,” and his subsequent books and plays have all been of the detective class.

At a luncheon party in London recently, Mr Angnstine 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 £SOO, and later sold again for £I,OOO.

The e are OQ pieces of Mr Walter de la Mare’s new volume, “Stuff and Nonsense.” ' Some of them are written in a new form, which de la Mare calls “Twiners,” because they consist of double limericks of the Lear model, moulded or twined into one. Here ate two examples:—

There was an old Begium of Frome, There was an old Yogi of Leicester; She sent him a tulip in bloom, He rolled his blaqk eyes and blessed her. How replete with delight Is a flower to the sight! It brightens the day and sweetens the mgnt. Oh! it ad the old ladies grew tulips in v lame, How happy Lie Yogis in Leicester!

'LN.ere was a young lady of Rkeims, There was an old poet of Gizetli; He ig tinned in the ueepest and sweetest- of tnemes, She scorned all his efforts to please lier: And he sighed, “Ah, I see rshe and sense won’t agree.” .to lie scribbled tier moonshine mere moonshine, and she, W ith jubilant screams, packed her trunk up iu Rheims, Cried aloud, “I am coming, (J Bard of my ui earns!” And was clasped to his bosom in Gizeth.

Mr St. John Fir vine thinks that the comic . igures in fiction and on the stage wiio drop aitches and pick them up again in fine wrong place are nnaenromsms : ' in 5!) years from to-day there probably will not be an li-dropper in Great Britain. In 20 years’ time .there certainly wih not be any h-inserters. But at' least a century will have to pass before some of our authors realise tiiese facts. I doubt if Americans will ever realise them. The trouble about, discussions of this sort is that those who insist that h-diopping or h-insert-mg is still general in tnis country can always produce an individual with whose aid they attempt to prove their case 1 did not believe that anybody e.er said, “Eh, wliatr” at the end of a sentence outside the novels of Mr 1* G. Wodehouse (in which I revel), but one day at a Junclienon party 1 met a well-known sculptor who ehwnatted as if he were the original Archie. 1 do not doubt that there are young women who swear and dope and discuss sex in a frightening fashion, but lie would be a poor idiot who imagined that these maidens represent their sex. There may he epigrammatic butlers somewhere in the world, though £ thank heaven 1 have not had the misfortune to meet any, but they are as scarce as maids who misuse their aspirates. The queer thing about the theatre is that although it sometimes satirises folly so effectually that the folly ceases, yet sit fails to discover that it- has performed its curative function, and continues to behave as if the particular folly survived; and in the end it is only in the theatre that it is to be found.

The “Memoirs of an Eighteenth-Cen-tury Footman” have just }>een republished— after 130 years—by Routledge. The author, John Macdonald, “Handsome Macdonald,” was the son of a family ruined in the ’45, and set out to repair his broken fortunes in a life full ol incident, romance, love-affairs travel, and masters, of whom he had in all 27, and whom lie served variously as valet, footman, barber, postillion, and groom. Macdonald’s name has been preserved, outside his own longneglected 'book, by William Sangster, the great authority on umbrellas; for Macdonald it was who really introduced the umbrella to London, effecting “that peaceful revolution which ended in the substitution of the Umbrella, for the Sword.’’ One of Macdonald’s adventures was to be present at- the death of Laurence Sterne:

He was sometimes called “Tristram Shandy, ’• and sometimes ‘Yorick” —a very great favourite of the gentlemen’s. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr Garrick Mr. Hume, and Mr James. “John,” said mv master, “go and inquire how Mr Sterne is to-day.” I went, returned, and said: “1 went to Mr Sterne’s lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited 10 minutes: but in five he said : ‘Now it i.s come.’ He put up Ids hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.”