LITERATURE AND ART.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8610, 4 July 1891, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART.

Sir Bernard Bckke is, it is said, bringing out a work in two volumes called " Colonial Gentry." In the next volume of the Badminton Library, to be published in May, there will be a special chapter on polo by Mr. J. Moray Brown. The April number of the Economic Keview (Percival and Co.) contains an article on " Social Conditions in a New England," by Bishop Barry. According to the Globe, a lady novelist is recorded to have said that when she dines with her publisher she always feels as if she had paid for the dinner. M. Taine has just published another volume of his great work on the Origins of Contemporary France, with the title, " Napoleon Bonaparte efc l'Etat Centralise." The next) volume, it is understood, will be the last. Messrs. Griffith, Farran, and Co. intend vepublishing some of the works of standard theology which have already appeared in " The Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature" in handsome library form, under the name of " The Westminster Library." Messrs. Truelove and Shirley will shortly publish Crozet's " Voyage to Tasmania, New Zealand, the Ladrone Islands, and the Philippines," edited by H. Ling Roth. The edition is sbrictly limited to 500 copies, a large portion of which will be taken at the Antipodes. The first election to the studentship in English language and literature under the Quain endowment at University College has fallen to Mr. J. Gollanez, lute scholar of Christ's College, who is associated with Prof. Skeat in the English teaching at Cambridge. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has just received a crowning honour. Lord Tennyson has sent him a letter complimenting him very highly on " The English Flag," the ringing poem which appeared in the National Observer ten days ago. The Laureate thinks it a noble expression of patriotic sentiment. Mr. Henry Ling Roth has just completed a translation of Crozet's "Voyage to Tasmania, New Zealand, and Ladrone Islands, and the Phillipines in the years 1771-72." Ifc will be published shortly by Messrs. Truslove and Shirley, with a preface by Mr. Jas. R. Booso, Librarian of the Royal Colonial Institute. The edition, uniform with Mr. Roth's" Aborigines of Tasmania," will be limited to 500 copies. Among poets und novelists Goethe stands almost alone as a distinguished student of science, not only well up in the latest conclusions, but an original investigator. To literary men, therefore, much interest attaches to the discovery by Prof. Bardeleben of a hiitherto unknown essay by the great poet on the comparative anatomy of the skulls of mammals. The date of the paper in question is given as 1794. Jean Francois Millet was a sturdy, an engaging, a.nd, within his own limited lines, a very admirable painter, whose name of late years has been in many months. The uninstracted are a little apt nowadays to compare him with the giant among landscape painters—Turner—and this to Turner's disadvantage. Grotesque juxtaposition ! It is as if some tyro in literature bethought him to compare Bloomfield with Shakespeare—" The Farmer's Boy" with " Hamlet" or " Macbeth."

A remarkable collection of ancient Oriental MSS. is jusb now on view at bhe Rhenish Museum for Philology. The owner is bhe Greek scholar, M. A. Papadopulos Kerameus, who has been for some years librarian bo the Patriarch of Jerusalem. In thecourse of his stay in Palistine he collected a large number of valuable old writings, and the present collection consists of no less than 1460 Greek, 177 Arabian and Turkish, 143 Georgian, fifty Syrian, twenby-bwo Slavonic, and nineteen Ethiopian MSS. Miss Ella. Sharpe-Youngs, the dramatic poet, who recently sent a poem to Prince Bismarck, has received from him a highly appreciative letter of thanks, in which he says, "I cannot but feel gratified that, surrounded as you are by objects that appeal to the rnind of a poet, you should have applied your remarkable powers to my fate.' Miss Sharpe -Youngs has lately completed a new lyrical drama in five acts, and is now engaged on a highly idealistic work, which embodies in bhe form of a novel the principal characteristics in bhe scenery of Kashmir, where she has lately passed a year.