PERSONAL ITEMS

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7222, 10 January 1885, Page 4 (Supplement)

PERSONAL ITEMS

Madame Bhelluachbr, the head of the league of women Anarchists in Germany and Austria, was » fashionable dressmaker at Zurich. Mr. Fargns sold his story, "Called Back," outright to its publisher for £80. Afterwards the publisher agreed to pay the author £8 for every 1000 copies sold, and since then Fergus's income has been about £50 a week. Mary Anderson is described by a London society journalist to be the most dudelydressed woman off the stage he ever saw ; and the same writer prophesies that the example of Mrs. Langtry will set the fashion of sending a Chinese boy and a little letter with every half-ounce of tea sold by retail dealers anxious to pußh their business. Lord Dufferin is of the opinion that the diplomacy of the world will soon be in the hands of Americans. r- Nearly every member of the diplomatic corps that gets to Washington, be says, tries to bring home an American wife. The wives, in most cases, become ambassadresses. Result: No diplomatic secrets any more, war and peace at the . will of the wives, and all wives American. The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon has issued 1800 sermons in regular succession. He calculates that he has occupied five years in preparing his 1800 sermons for the Press —that is, in revising the shorthand reports, each of which took, at least, a whole day to correct. They are practically two quite different pieces of composition. But the great orator-preacher always insists uponhis printed sermons being tho only genuine ones. _ Robert Buchanan, the litterateur, thinks that America possesses in Walt Whitman the most original poet in the world, the noblest soldier in Sherman, the profoundest philosophic physiologist in Draper, the greatest humourist in Mark Twain, the finest living actor in Jefferson, and the wisest statesman in Lincoln. American cigarettes are abominable, and nowhere in the world is so much feminine beauty to be found. Monsiguor Capel has been giving England the benefit of his ideas on language as a study. He says : "If I were called upon to define an educated man, I should say it was the man who knows his own language best. The fundamental law of English elocution is to pronounce the vowels well, and let the consonants take care of themselves. The rule should be reversed, and should be : Pronounce carefully your consonants, and let the vowels take care of themselves. Besides this mechanical knowledge of the language one must know the use of words. Half the prejudices of mankind and more than half its follies would disappear if men would thoroughly understand the words they use." Mr. Gladstone does not smoke ; indeed, he "detests" it. Mr. Arnold, too, abjures tobacco ; so does Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Frederick Harrison, and so did Charles Reade. Professor Huxley never smoked till he was forty. Mr James Payn smokes, as the Americans would say, all the time. M. Jules Simon never does, on the score of gallantry ; M. Taine does, on the score of ideas, whioh are, he thinks, promoted by an occasional cigarette. Lord Tennyson and Prince Bismarck are, as everyone knows, ardent smokers ; M. Daudet, as did Charles Kingiley, patronises clay pipes ; Mr. Browning, and Mr. Froude, and Mr. Millais, we believe, do not disdain that " plant divine of rarest virtue," as Charles Lamb called the blessed weed he had nevertheless determined to abjure. ■ Here is a curious and amusing story about William Black, the novelist, which he might have incorporated into one of his novels. it would have filled a volume easily. Condensed it assumes this statement: Black, while on a ramble near Dunolly Castle, suddenly took it into his head to have a "swim. He undressed, and plunged in. As he was returning to where his clothes were, judge his horror when be saw a young lady sitting down en a boulder, reading (from the appearance of the binding) one of his own novels. Black coughed, ahem'd, &c., but all to no purpose. The fair one still kept her eyes upon the fascinating page. After the lapse of nearly half an hour a man came up with a gun, and having seen Black's black head bobbing up and down, exclaimed, "Hech 1 a seal 1" and brought his gun to his shoulder. This was too much for Black's nerves. He yelled out, "For Heaven's sake, don't fire I I'm a real man!" and tossed propriety to the winds and ran for it. The lovely young lady was round the corner like a flash of lightning. '