LITERATURE AND ART.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9497, 28 April 1894, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART.

- There are seven colleges in the United ' States which maintain daily newspapers'-' ; namely, Harvard, Yale,, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, the University of Pennyslvania, and the University of California. The next volumes of Messrs. Macmillan'* Eversley Series will be Mr. Henry Craik'a Life of Swift," Mr. R. H. Hutton's "Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and 1 Thinkers," and the new and larger edition of Edward FitzGerald's "Letters." Keble College, Oxford, comes in for a the substantial addition to its possessions by will of Mrs. Combe, widow of Mr. Thomas Combe, of the Clarendon Press. One item in her academic benefactions is the gift) of £1600, to provide due house-room for Hoiman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World," which she presented to the cob lege. There aro also substantial legacies to Mr. Holman ant and his son. Dodo," the work of the Archbishop of Canterbury's son, was written, it is said, in j six weeks. The Archbishop himself is much more leisurely in his literary work. For nearly thirty years he has been writing a book—and not a large which is still very far from being completed. Thirty years is a long period to have had one work in hand. Kinglake's "Crimea" took twenty-five years to write. Hiu any modern book taken longer ? The Brussels Museum has been enriched with two paintings by Louis David, the famous French painter of revolutionary fame in 1792-95. He was exiled from France, and made his residence at Brussels, where he was well treated. As a token of gratitude for the Belgian hospitality, David's grandson has bequeathed to the Museum of Brussels the celebrated paintings, " Marat Expiring in His Bath-tub," and Mars Disarmed by Venus," besides a portrait of Louis David by Navez. Mr. Walter Besant thinks the outlook in letters was never brighter than at present. We have many excellent novelists and poets. Among the latter he names Messrs. Norman Gale, William Watson, and Richard le Gallienne, while he considers Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Barrie are enough to make the reputation of a generation. " Kipling is the greatest genius we have had tor fifty years in imagination, genius, and grip. I think his story, ' The Man Who Would Be King,' the finest story in the English language." Some unpublished reminiscences of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's student days, in career and in art, will appear in a work which Messrs. Sampson Low, Marston and Co. have in the press for immediate publication, entitled " Dante G. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement," by Mrs. J. W. Wood. Several important drawings and studies of Rossetti have been reproduced for the first time through the courtesy of Lord Battersea, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, and others, which will appear in the book as full-page photogravure illustrations. The work will describe the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and its long conflict against the academic traditions. "lota," otherwise Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, the wife of a Kensington doctor, has been so much encouraged by the success of "A Yellow Aiter" that she has decided to devote herself altogether to literature, and is already engaged upon a new novel, which, like her first, will be strictly psychological. Meanwhile fiction has, for a while at least, lost the services of the lady who was mistaken for "lota." For Miss Olive Schrsiner was married the other day to Mr. Crinvrright, a young colonist of thirty years old, with very advanced views on South African politics. The married couple have decided to live on a farm away from civilisation in the Karroo, and the authoress is more disinclined than ever to issue any new work. Professor Huxley, in the introduction to the latest volume of his essays, " Hume, With Helps to the Study of Berkeley" (Macßoillan), quits the region of theological combat, and gives what he calls " a word of parting advice to the rising generation of English readers." It is this : —"lf," he says, "it is your desire to discourse fluently and learnedly about philosophical questions, begin with the lonians, and work steadily through to the latest new speculative treatise. If you have a good memory and a fair knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German, three or four years spent in this way should enable you to attain your object. If, on the contrary," he adds, "you are animated by the much rarer desire for real knowledge ; if you want to get a clear conception of the deepest problems set before the intellect of man, there in no need, so far as I can see, for you to go beyond the limits of the English tongue. Indeed, if you are pressed for time, three authors will suffice—Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes."