PERSONAL ITEMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 10419, 17 April 1897, Page 4 (Supplement)

PERSONAL ITEMS.

Tue sudden death of the great actor, Friedrich Jlitterwurzer, is as yet unexplained, bub it is supposed that he was poisoned by n mouth-«ra6h. His remains will be cremated nt Goth*.

M. Maurus Jokai, the Hungarian novelist, has been gazotted a life member of the Hungarian House of Magnates. The celebrated author was for 35 years a member of the Lower House, but failed to obtain a seat at the last election. It is rumoured in Parliamentary circles that upon Lord Rosmead's retirement from the Governorship of Cape Colony the post will be offered to Sir John Goret. The circumntanco that Sir John Gorst knows nothing of the matter does not prove the report to be unfounded. Admiral Sir Alexander Milne, the oldest British Admiral, died at his residence nt Musselburgh, in his ninety-first year. He entered the Royal Navy nearly eighty years ago, and has held various important command?. For eleven years he was Naval Lord of the Admiralty. Professor Alexander Graham Bell, the distinguished Scotsman who invented the telephone, has received the honorary degree LL.D, from Harvard University. Professor Bell is a son of Mr. Melville Bell, of Edinburgh, author of " Bell's Elocution," and taught elocution in Canada while engaged in his experiments on telephony. Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, the well-known authoress, has recently gone to America, where rumour ha 3 it she intonda to spend the winter. With the exception of last year, when she remained in London, Mrs. Burnett has for somo years made a point of crossing the "herring-pond" lor the purpose of spending some months on the other side.

Mr. Hutton, of the Spectator, is one of the few journalists who have won in a remarkable degree the personal interest and affection of their readers, and it is hard, says a contemporary, to see who could take his place on the Press. He has united in a very unusual way broad literary sympathies and fine critical perceptions with the h'rmost grasp of Christian truth and tho most unflinching courago in expounding and defending it. Sarah Bernhardt is an ncute business woman as well as a great actress. She has get up a millinery establishment in New York, and put a couple of charming young Parisian women into it. The "drawing" features of the new establishment, are Uiese:—lt will bear Mine. Sarah's name. It will display hats of Mine. Sarah's own choosing. And it will be supervised and given the proper air of distinction by Mine. Sarah's own niece.

The report that Mme. Navarro (Mary Anderson) intends returning to the scage is untrue. Her baby, now tko weeks old, was born at Witnblodon, where a cottage had been taken near ths country homo of the court doctor, Sir John Williams. But tho happy parents have returned to their home in Gloucestershire, where ihey have for neighbours ICdwin Abbey and Mr. and Mrs. Frank Millet. Mme. Navarro lost her only other child about two years ago. In reproducing (January '.':>) Justin McCarthy's "Story of Gladstone's Life" from The Outlook, we noted tho fact that tho biographer had very little to eay of Mr. Gladstone's mother, A Canadian reader of The Outlook, noticing the same omission, has since written to that journal as follows: " When oho observes that Mr. McCarthy truces r-he genealogy upon the father's side back to the close of the thirteenth century and shows how an ancestor, Herbert do Gledstanes, figures as one of the lairds ' who swore fealty to Edward 1.,' one wonders why the mother should not be as much as mentioned by name. 'Ho (the father) was a pure Lowland Scotchman, and he married a Highland Scotchwoman.' Yes, but that woman could alao truce her lineage back to a thirteen-century man who won against Edward I. one of the world's decisivo battles and secured for Scotland her independence. Anne Robertson was descendod in a direct line from Robert the Bruce. Upon reading the ecant reference to this gifted and cultured woman, 1 recalled the remark in one of her son's speeches made to a Scotch audience many years ago, that he had in his veins the blood of King Robert, and I find the record is in Burke. To his mother, I think, more than to his father, Gladstone owes the qualities of heart and intellect which have produced in him one of the world's greatest men."