IN BOOKLAND

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 9 March 1929, Page 16

IN BOOKLAND

Major P. C. Wren has written a fourth “Geste” book, which Mr. Murray announces for immediate publication. It is entitled “Good Gestes,” (and is a book of “stories of Beau Geste, his. brothers, and certain of their comrades in the French Foreign Legion.’’

The anniversary of ;die birth ol By ron was celebrated in London on January 22 by the production in the Lyric Theatre of Miss Alicia Ramsey’s play, “Byron.” The play portrays incidents in the life of the poet. The action is chiefly in London between 1813 and 1816, but the last act is in Greece. The part of Lord Byron was played by Mr. Esme Percy, Lady Byron by Miss Dorothy Cheston, Lady Caroline* Lamb by Miss Beatrice Lehmann, and Augusta Leigh by Miss Mona Limerick. Other characters in the play were Southey, Walter Scott, John Murray, Sir Charles Hobliouse, and the Prince Regent.

The American “Bookman” for January gives the following list of novels most in demand in the public libraries of the United States: (1) “Old Pybus,” Warwick Deeping; (2) “Swan bong,” John Galsworthy; (3-; “All Kneeling,” Anne Parish; (4) “The Bridge of Sail Luis Bey,” Thornton Wilder; (o) “The Children,” Edith Wharton; (.6) “The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg,” Louis Bromfield; (7) “The Island Within,” Ludwig Lewisolin; (8) “Silver Slippers,” Temple Bailey; (9) “The Greene Murder Case,” S. S. Van Dine;! (10) “The Age of Reason,” Philip i Gibbs; (11) “The Foolish Virgin,” i Kathleen Norris; (12) “Wintersmoon,”| Hugh Walpole. j

An English woman is the heroine and I a Frenchman the author of a book which will shortly appear with Hutchinson. It is entitled “The Mysterious Baronne cle Feucheres,” and by this, of course, M. Louis Andre means Sophie Dawes, or Daw, for there were two spellings of her name. While living in London in 1804 she made the acquaintance of the exiled Duke of Bourbon, last of the famous line of Conde and the greatest of French subjects, next after royalty itself. How she plotted and where her schemes car-' ried her is told with hitherto unpublished details.

Biography is always in favour with English readers and various volumes of it are to be published shortly. The “Life and Lett ere” of Sir Edmund Gosse are being prepared by his son, Dr. Philip Gosse. Lord Hanworth has written a memoir of his grandfather, Chief Baron Pollock. Within recent years much new personal information has appeared about David Livingstone, and the llev. 11. J. Campbell makes it the basis of a new memoir of the explorer. We are also to have a modern study, suggested by a like circumstance, of Sir Walter Scott from the pen of Mr. Stephen Gwynn.

New glimpses of celebrities of the .Georgian times will be found in a book the Oxford Press has in hand, “Lady Louisa. Stuart’s notes on George Selwyn and His Contemporaries,” a work by John Henage Jesse. Lady Louisa was, of course, a daughter of Lord Bute, the Prime Minister of’ George 111. She was a shrewd, observant lady, and probably for the I benefit of her nephew and nieces she made many notes on her copy of Jesse’s book. Jt is now in the possession of Mr. W. S. Lewis, who edits the notes, which include many references to George Selwyn. Other subjects are George the .Third, Lady Sarah Lennox, Charles James Fox, and Top-? ham Beauclerk.

More books were published in England during 1928 than ever before. The “Publishers’ Circular” announces that there has been a steady annual increase in the total of publications since 1922, with the sole exception ,of 1928, the year of the general strike, in 1922 the total number of new books and new editions was 10,842; in 1928 the 1 figure lose to 14,399, an increase of 589 over the returns for 1927. This means that nearly forty books and pamphlets per day were issued. “Truly, of the making of. books there is still no end,” says the “Morning Post,” “and if a modern Ecclesiastes were forced to study them all, lie would find the task not merely a weariness of the flesh; he would be reduced to complete,' nervous prostration. Fiction, it should be noted, was responsible for roughly a quarter of the total output; after fiction came the “juvenile” class, with 1.439 volumes for the year; and, unexpected as it may be, the "third most popular class was that of books dealing with “religion,” of which there were 981. There was a considerable fall in works of poetry and the drama.

Dean Inge, in an article on “Wisdom in Tabloid” in the London “Evening Standard,” prints some of his own aphorisms “which have hitherto reposed in a very private notebook.” Amoim them are these:

Never put a man entirely in the wrong, if you want to be his friend afterwards.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

He who will live for others shall have great troubles, but they shall seem to him small. He who will live lor himself shall have small troubles, but they shall seem to him great. A man’s personal religion is that which corrects the obliquity of his own spiritual vision A prophet’s religion is that which corrects the obliquity of his generation’s spiritual vision. We like to stone the prophets, because we have got used to our own spectacles. The one thing that a dreamer never does is to dream that he is dreaming. Theology is spoilt by rhetoric, not by philosophy. Ebb and flow in the spiritual life, as in the sea, are necessary, and arc a sign of life, not of death.

Pessimism contains its own refutation ; it believes in an ideal standard by which the world is judged to be ev i I.

The past is not dead—l have travelled out of sight of it, that is all. To-morrow is new to me, not to God.

What are the qualifications of an historian? A scientific conscience; a poetical imagination; a prophetic soul.

“Know thyself” is really the sum of wisdom; for he who knows himself knows also God.

A correspondent of the London ‘‘Sunday Times’’ corrects a popular error:—Johnson’s Court and Boswell Court, in Fleet Street, were not named after Johnson and his biographer. Johnson’s Court was so named long before Johnson went to live there, and the name of Boswell Court goes back to Tudor times. It is really a remarkable coincidence that two courts so closely connected with the great doctor and his friend should bear their names, and a pardonable error to suppose that the courts derived their names from our two eighteenth cen- > tury friends. !