LITERARY NOTES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXIV, Issue 9173, 5 August 1890, Page 6

LITERARY NOTES.

(Gentleman's Magazine ) Johnson’s huge body was an accumulation of physical diseases. He was halfdeaf and more than half-blind; he was at times morbid to insanity; he had tendencies to palsy, gout, asthma, dropsy; his face was seamed with scrofula; he rarely passed a day without pain. His early life was unhappy and obscure. The ills of the scholar’s life, which he enumerates in his immortal line— Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol, he hal known with one exception. He never had a patron. It was the era of Freotrade in literature, following on a period of thoroughly unhealthy Protection. “ A man,” he said to Boswell, “ goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can; we have done with patronageand the letter to Lord Chesterfield—the Magna Charta, as it was, of literary independence—simply stated the bare, hard facts of his career. The last thirty years of Johnson’s life were secure from want, hut the iron had entered into his soul. For long after the decline of Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. E. James, the historical novel seemed almost extinct. “Esmond” and “The Virginians” and “ The Tale of Two Cities,” and “ Eomola,” and “Cloister and Hearth,” proved that great and popular novelists like Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Charles Eeade could venture still on this old path. But few imitated them, and the public were not supposed to care for the attempt. To-day we see historical novels everywhere, not, I hope, in consequence of Mr Allen’s “ recrudescence of barbarism and Jingo reaction ” —a very mild little reaction; barbarism will not “recrudesce” from that—but from another quarter. Mr Allen has not touched that part of the subject—the historical novel —but probably he would agree that its revival is partly due to the revival of historical studies. Of course all the new historical novels have not that origin. Mr Besant’s, for example; ho would probably have written whether history was being more closely and widely studied or not. So would the authors of the " Splendid Spur ” and “ Micah Clarke ” have written on distant times, just as Dumas did. But “ John Inglesant ” had a real and ardent historical motive. Mr Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and his latest novels proceed from serious historical studies. The history is not “ got up ” for the novel, the novel comes out of the knowledge of history. Mr Haggard probably does not intend to be scientific, but the new knowledge of and interest in Egypt makes “ Cleopatra” possible. The researches of M. Feydeau (much better known as a novelist than an Egyptologist) were at the root of Theophile Gautier’s “ Roman d’une Monie .” And now we have, for the latest historical novel, a tale of the Exodus, by an author who was an Egyptologist long before he was a novelist —namely, the “Joshua” of Dr George Ebers.