LITERATURE AND ART.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9581, 4 August 1894, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART.

Count Tolstoi is writing a " cosmopolitan drama," which he says is to be the last of his works. The largest oil-painting in the world is one by . Tintretto, entitled Paradise. It is thirty-three and a-balf feet in height and eighty-four feet in width. With the sanction and approval of Lady Clark, a biography of the late Sir Andrew Clark is in course of preparation, to which an introduction is promised by Mr. Gladstone, . One of the unfinished plans of the late Professor Robertson Smith was a dictionary of the Bible, which was to be brought out by the Messrs. Black, of Edinburgh. Canon Cheyne has now undertaken . to edit the work. The American School of Athens, working on the site of Argos, has laid bare a large marble building which is supposed to be the gymnasium, and has uncovered many very early tombs like those which Schliemann fouud at- Mycenae. There is said to be no decline in the sale in England of George Eliot's works. Only one author—EdnaLyallha3 had . ie credit of lowering the sales of the books of the author of "The Mill on the Floss." That effect, however, was short-lived. The hero of Alexandre Dumas' " Chevalier de Maison Rouge" was in real life Alexander Dominique Joseph Gouzze. He was wealthy, called himself Marquis de Rougeville, and fought In the American War for Independence. His biography, published in Paris the other week, contains tales of adventures enough for a dozen cape-and-sword novels. Miss Lawrence Alma-Tadema has been receiving a certain amount of printed praise for the freshness and cleverness of the title of her new novel, "The Wings of Icarus." But nothing is new in this senescent world. Charles de Bernard wrote "Lea Ailes d'lcare" something like fifty years ago, and Thackeray spoke of it at some length in " The Paris Sketch-Book." The new Scotch writer of stories, S. R. Crockett, at a recent dinner of the Pen and Pencil Club of Edinburgh, Said he began his literary career as an art - critic in London. He then published a volume of poems, which no one read, and, in referring to the honour done him by Pen and Pencil Club, said he was singularly unworhy of it, since all his work was done with a typewriter. The Tennyson manuscript, "Poems of Two Brothers," is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. There is an odd glimpse in an old journal, which lately | came to the surface, of the Alfred Tennyson of 1 1840. Those were the days and nights when the poet wandered weirdly up and down his mother's house in the small hours, murmuring poetry as he went; then he was wont to aver that he saw " things" in those small hours, or '/before a midnight fire," and would afterwards sketch for his friends strange, grim forms, half human and half beast. The Paris Salon this year contains a picture by a lady who rejoices in the name of Dhaubai Fardoonjee Banajee. She is a young Parsee girl, who took prizes in Bombay, at the Arb Society, and went to London, where she passed two years ab Bushey Park, under the tuition of Hubert Herkomer. Latterly, she has been in Paris, working in the Louvre and Luxembourg-. The painter Bonnab has ' taken " much interest in her, and ib is probably owing to his efforts thab the Salon has taken a head by her in oil-colours. She is the first Parsee woman to come to Europe to study arb, perhaps the first native of India, and certainly the first East Indian who has shown work at a great international affair in Paris such as the Salon now has become. Some valuable advice to beginners in the art of essay-writing is given by the Pall Mall Gazette:"So long as you do nob begin with a definition, you may begin anywhere. An abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion . of the , clown's entry through the chemist's window. Then whack at your reader at once, bib him over the head with the 'sausages, brisk him up with the poker, tumble him into she, wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before he knows where you are. You can do what you like* with a reader then, it you only keep him nicely on the move. As long as you are happy, your reader will be so, too. Bub one law must be observed: an essay, like a dog that wishes to please, mpst have & lively tail; short but as waggish as possible. Like a rockeb an essay goes only with fizzle and sparks ab the end of it. And to know thab to shop writing is the secreb of writing .an essay; the essay that) the public loves (lies young."