OTHER LANDS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2662, 2 June 1908, Page 7

OTHER LANDS.

A letter written in the spirit of a solicitor is not a cheerful document. The • best qualification | for letterwriting is a blithe indifference and a merry don't-care-a-hangitiveness. If these qualities are joined with humour and .wit, then a letter is worth writing, and worth reading. I hope to live to read some day the collected letters of Mr:. Bernard Shaw. Matthew Arnold,*said rttaat Shelley's letters would be remembered when his poetry ..was forgotten, and 1 should not mind making a similar bet abdut ■■ Mr. Douglas, in the "Star."

It was not. till the pf e-ftaphaelites began to! observe "things for themselves, that trees first appeared in art with an accuracy of bark and twig and bud which is • sometimes almost photographic. It- may be questioned, for example, w-hether the very familiarity of every . touch in the painting .of the willows in "The Hireling Shepherd" does not conflict with the unfamiliar details of the. costumes of the two figures, and thus help to destroy the unity of the subject. Yet we have travelled far from the days when the painting of trees • was kept purely, conventional and generic for the reason that too close an inquiry into the particular forms of nature would have been considered by the artist and his public alike as something illiberal and absurd.—"Times."

Physiologists are able to speak ' more definitely as far as average constitutions are concerned. The combustion of carbon by the human body has been found to. increase, I|p to about the thirtieth to remain stationary until about forty-five, and then to diminish. Then, again, the brain usually stops growing at about fifty, and from sixty to seventy it is more likely to decrease. It has been related by Canon Mac Coll that Mr. Gladstone's head was constantly outgrowing his hats. As late as the Midlothian campaign, when he was nearly seventy,, fie was obliged""*to have his head reraeasured for this reason. Canon MacColl's conclusion that this continual growth of brain contributed to Mr. Gladstone's perennial youthfulness appears not unwarranted. —"Spectator."

* » « * "If I lend you thia money, how do I know I shall get'ft back at • -the time you mention?" * "I prcAnise, myljoy, on the**ro*d of a gentleman !" ' "All right—bring him round this evening !"- *> , ' )

I Many Englishmen are proud «of their government of India, but we doubt whether many exactly perceive what a cause for pride they have in the fact that Parliament has never sought through them to lighten British taxation ; has never appointed an agent, whether Viceroy or Secretary of State, who has wished to make money out of the great dependency, or has in any way desired to plunder them, or to limit the freedom which the writer once heard a Dutch Governor-General deliberately condemn as " suicidal."—" Spectar tor."- 1604.