COMING CENTENARIES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8626, 6 July 1908, Page 7

COMING CENTENARIES.

Australia's fine contribution just lately ro the list of centenarians maty suggest a pang of regret that a whole host of distinguished persons wore not Australians. It is quite astonishing how many great men, if they had not got out of j the habit of living, might be still amongst us this year, at the ago of only ninety-nine. The Grand Old Man himself, William Gladstone, would be a year and a half from his centenary, December 29th, 1909. Abraham Lincoln, born in February, 1809, had his fate allowed, might still have boon watching, from some calm retreat, tho remarkable developments of his country's history. Tennyson and Edgar Allan Poe, Lord lioughton and Oliver Wendell Holmes, would all be entering upon their hundredth year. Chopin and Mendelssohn are their contemporaries in the musical world; Darwin in science. Then Edward Fitzgerald, whose "Rubaiyat" has come so recently into general esteem that one hardly dates its author so far back, ia yet of the same great, company ; and Mrs Browning was long supposed to have been born in iBO9, until a too accurate husband unkindly- disclosed the date as 1806, thus putting her out of the remarkable group of famous people who first saw the light in that later and most auspicous year. But, if genius does not prove so effective against "slow poisoning time" as to soe its own great anniversaries, any centenary celebration is now left in very good hands. A large part of the world's business in 1909 will be tho preparation of commemorative fetea and obituary addresses. Chopin will bo recalled, with special musical honours, in Warsaw and in Paris. The University of Virginia, says Munsey's Magazine, will acclaim Edgar Allan Poe as one of its most distinguished sons, "while New York, where he spent the greater part of his literary life, will probably arrange an impressive memorial celebration." Harvard will do the right thing for Holmes, "because Cambridge was his birthplace, and because he was a Harvard man," but many pens and pilgrims from afar will honour that wise and- gentle shade. The natural place for j a Tennvson pageant, is judged to be either Farringford or Aldworth, and if truly representative of his works, itshould promise very decorative effects indeed. Lincoln memorials, throughout the States, are looming, of course, on a vast and national scale ; while the recognition of Gladstone's centenary, in Great Britain, will depend upon local political sympathies, and may be decidedly patchy.