LITERATURE AND ART.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9094, 30 June 1888, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART.

Max Mi ller says that Finland's national epic, " Kalevala," is equal to the Illiad. Fitz - Greene Ilalleck's poem, ' .Marco Bozzari's," has been suppressed in Turkey. A cheap edition, in one volume, of Miss F. Gordon - Cumming's "Wanderings in China" is being prepared. "Christmas Eve," Sir John Millais' picture of Murthly Castle, has been sold for the very high figure of £4000. Richard H. Stoddard so far forgets his dignity as a critic as to refer to imitations of the verse of Edgar Allan Poe as " Poetry." Colonel Parker Gilmore's new book, "Days and Nights by the Desert," will be issued almost immediately by Messrs. Kegan Paul and Co.

Professor Nichol has undertaken to write a monograph on " Bacon" for Messrs. Blackwood's series of " Philosophical Classics for English Readers."

Mr. Melville Bell, the author of " Visible Speech," etc., is going to issue a volume in which he tries to show the fitness of English to serve as the universal language. The papers on "The British Army,' which the author of "Greater Britain" has been contributing to the Fortnightly Review, will be published in volume form. Mr. Aaron Watson lias nearly ready an historical romance, under the title of "Through Lust ot Gold." The main characters of the story sail with »Sir Walter Raleigh on his last expedition to Guiana. The Early English Text Society has the whole of its books for ISBS in type ; and the first of them, the text and translation of the unique Treatise on the Vices and Virtues, •■lre. I*2oo A.D. (Stowe MS. 210, Brit. Mus), edited by Dr. F. Holthausen, is now ready. Professor Karl Lachmann, the well-known classical scholar, has written the article on the " Iliad" for Ersch and Gruber's " Encyklopadie." The essay covers some twenty pages, the conclusion arrived at being that the "Iliad" consisted of eighteen separate poems by several authors. A wonderful landscape on exhibition in Paris has been executed in European and foreign insects. Every desired tone is supplied by 45,000 coleoptera in the foreground and 4000 varieties of the insect tribe for the remainder of the pictures. The work required four years of the artist's time. Among the new novels about to be published are " The Mystery of Mirbridge," by Mr. James Payn ; " Eve : A Romance," by the author of" John Herring," both from Messrs. Chatto and Windus ; while Messrs. Regan Paul and Co. promise "A Romance of the Recusants," and " The Pillar House," a one-volume story by Mrs. Severne. Miss Laura A. Smith's long-promised book, "The Music of the Waters," is now in the hands of the printers. Besides sailors' "chanties" and working songs of the sea of all maritime nations, the volume will contain boatmen's, fishermen's, rowing songs, and a collection of water legends. Messrs. Kegan Paul and Co. axe the publishers.

The first number of the Universal Review, which is edited by Mr. Harry Quilter and published by Messrs. Swan Sonnenschein and Co., will contain a "Proem," by Mr. Lewis Morris ; " The State of Europe," by Sir Charles Dilke ; " Zola," by Mrs. Lynn Linton; " General Boulanger," by Mrs. Crawford; "The House of Lords," by the Earl of Pembroke ; and other contributions. The price is to be 2s 6d. There was an interesting piece of news at the end of the memoir of Matthew Arnold in the Times. " A vast number of letters from him to various members of his family are in existence, which are full of the personal and the literary charm that attaches to the best of his writings." The posthumous volume, which one may hope is thus foreshadowed, will not be the least interesting of Matthew Arnold's works. One interesting thing in the Birmingham Library report was the table of " Ages of the Borrowers who qualified in 1887." I remember Lord Randolph Churchill once telling the Cambridge undergraduates that a man's thinking days were over at twenty- If reading is the food of thinking, then the Birmingham figures quite agree with Lord Randolph's experience. The great reading age, it seems, is from fourteen to twenty—nearly 40 percent, of the Birmingham "borrowers" being within those limits. After twenty the readers gradually tail off until we come to those between fifty and sixty, who numb*, v 1 Jy 1 per cent, of the whole.