LITERATURE AND ART

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9130, 11 August 1888, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART

1 The Art Association of Montreal has declined a gift of £2000 because it was offered with a proviso that the museum should be open on Sunday. .... . , Sir John Millais' new landscape, "Christ mas Eve," which he has recently painted in Scotland, is included in T. M'Lean's twentyfourth annual exhibition, which opened on March 19. Messrs. Bentley and Son, the publishers of Mrs. Wood's novels, are about to issue them in a cheaper form. " East Lynne" will be sold for 3s 6d, to be followed monthly by the other novels. It is announced that one result of the expiration of the copyright of many of Carlyle's works will be the publication of a collection of magazine articles which he never would allow to be reprinted. Mr. C. H. Firth, of Balliol College, Oxford, late Professor of History at the Firth College, Sheffield, has nearly ready for issue an edition of Dr. Johnson's "Life of Milton." The work, which is in foolscap octavo, will be published this month by the Clarendon Press.

Mr. George Jacob Holyoake has a new work in the press entitled "Self-Help a Hundred Years Ago." The work is said to be a hist-or} - of self-helping devices—not theories, but devices — successfully put into practice at the end of the last century, exceeding in variety any in the minds of persons living now. M. Alexandre Dumas was asked the other day why he did not write his autobiography. "1 don't write my memoirs," he said, " because a man cannot tell the story of his own life without writing of those of others. Those of whom I should write would rather that I were silent, and 1 have no desire to write about myself. It is, however, possible to draw episodes from one's personal souvenirs which time has formed into a whole to which nothing more is to be joined, which form one more lesson on the absurdities of human life, and which can no longer hurt or do injustice to anybody." And there is the hope amongst his friends that M. Dumas will undertake such an autobiography in romance. The first, part of a series of reproductions from the choicest drawings in the British Museum is about to be published by the trustees. It will contain twenty-five numbers, taken principally from the works of the old Italian schools, with a few by masters of Germany and Flanders. The selection has been made with a view to supplying facsimiles of preliminary sketches or studies for pictures in the National Gallery, and to illustrate recent additions to the collection, and especially the noble gift of Michel Angelo's drawings due to Mr. Henry Vaughan. Some specimen pages of the " Bellini" sketch-book have been added. A critical text by the Keeper of the Prints will accompany the plates. A sharp but brief cerebral attack has brought Mr. Frank Miles' promising career to an end. He was a noted painter of feminine loveliness. He was undoubtedly a victim, and not the tirst, to the terrible financial depression existing among artists. He made his mark about fourteen years ago by his pencil sketches of female heads. Afterwards he had for a time a considerable vogue both as a portrait and subject painter, taking, like Sir Frederick Leighton, the famous Sally Hicks as his model. Latterly he has sold nothing, and his ill luck has brought on the malady to which death has put a merciful termination. He was a man of singularly pleasing presence and sympathetic manner. At one time he was closely allied with Oscar Wilde, but in later years they became estranged. Max O'Rell says:—"lf ever I write a book on America the lively chapter will be on the Press. It has plenty of enterprise, it is true. I saw the World office one night; there were about fifty reporters writing up the matters they had obtained during the day. Then the Sunday edition of the paper ! Thirty-two pages of articles and sketches for three-hap'ence. It was wonderful ! But you can't go to the papers for knowledge—for facts. The enterprise is carried too far : imagination supplies the place of information. If you don't grant an ' interview ' you will probably find one manufactured for you. If the authorities can find no witnesses of a crime, the newspaper will hash them up for itself. It will become prosecutor, judge, and jury combined. This is wrong."