AMONG THE BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14730, 12 July 1911, Page 10

AMONG THE BOOKS.

A generous lie is bettor than a mean truth. —Anna Constantino.

A woman's beauty depends entirely upon how much she is loved. —The Devourcrs, by A. Vivanti Chartres.

There are a great many people with motor cars nowadays who cannot afford to keep a donkey.—Judge Emden.

Study to be quiet; contain yourself within your own business, and let the prying, censorious, vain, and intriguing world follow its own devices. —Thomas a Kempis.

It is really rather wonderful, when you think of it, what ono solitary Englishman and his subordinates can accomplish. Some young creature of 26, it may bo. is put in charge of a district as large as Perthshire, while its .head has gone Home oil, leave, and behold him adjusting himself to the situation in no time, as if to the manner born.—From "Letter from India," by Lady Wilson (A. E. Macleod).

Gothic architecture was too well fitted for the time, too abrupt in its success, too exact an expression of the mind of tho revival, to be merely an accidental or material tiling influencing the plans of the builders. Tho soul made it; a need that had run through now two generations of Northern Europe discovered' its satisfaction; and if I may put the matter somewhat fantastically, I would say that the lances appearing with the Crusades, tho tall masts, of ships, and the deep lanes of the East, were its types.—Hilaire Belloc.

You have tho usual old-fashioned notion in your head that Dublin Castle is full of landlords going up the front stairs, priests going down the back stairs, and politicians waiting about in the basement storey expecting to be made into County Court judges. That's what you think and, of course, you're perfectly right as to the facts. Where you make tho mistake is in supposing that the Lord-Lieutenant likes that kind of thing. He doesn't. He puts up with it simply because he's paid to put up with it. In reality he hates the whole business. The sight of a landlord turns him actually, sick, and he's so fed up with priests and politicians that he wouldn't care if every one of the whole crew was at the bottom of the sea, with some kind of a floating tombstone anchored to his dead body. —From "The Major's Niece," by George A. Birmingham.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is .bom and eats, that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides of man. This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race. His joys delight, his sorrow wounds him, according as this' is interested or indifferent, in the affair; according as they arise in an Imperial war or in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains of the mind. He may lose all and this hot suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and this leap in his bosom with a cruel pang. Ido not speak of it to ardent theorists: the living man knows keenly what it is I moan.R. L. Stevenson.

I do not know of any period when people did not talk of the decline of the drama. Aristotle talked of it while Euripides was alive. Sir Philip Sidney thought the English drama was contemptible while Marlowe was writing and Shakespeare was just beginning. It is a parrot cry that echoed down the ages, and it is singularly stupid just now when for the first time in a hundred years the drama among English-speaking people is rising into real rivalry with prose fiction. "What is particularly interesting is that the drama is drawing away the novelist. Novel-writing is easy and play-writing is hard, and the real artiste loves difficulty the easiest way is not good for his art. So you see D'Annunzio, in Italy, starting as a novelist and turning dramatist. Paul Heivieux, Bernaid' Shaw, J,, M. Barrie, and John Galsworthy all started as novelists.Professor Brander Mattbe_wjs*