AMONG THE BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14928, 28 February 1912, Page 10

AMONG THE BOOKS.

Ojx and water —woman and a secret are hostde properties.—Bulwer Lytton, People with pasts are always so easily offended.—"Penelope's Progress," by Lady Angela Forbes. The author has a cruel lot nowadays no time in which to write, very little to write about, and the greatest difficulty to find anyone to read what he has written. —Gentlewoman. Even as derelict ships will drift towards each other in mid-ocean, so will criminals bo drawn together in a crowded town.— •'Love and Treasure Laden," hv Captain Will Brooke.

It is impossible for a work of art ever to be produced where more than one brain is permitted to direct.—"On tho Art of the Theatre," by Edward Gordon Craig.

In these days we season our love-making with talk about hereditary philanthropy and sanitation, and present one another with Fabian publications instead of flowers. —H. G. Wells's Calendar.

If originality could have materialised in the form of a dragon Airs. Malcolm would assuredly have felt herself destined by Heaven to bo a feminine St. George for the annihilation thereof.—" The Revoke of Jean Raymond," by May Ford.

Both men and animals are subject to a nameless kind of fear that is the result, not of the dangers of the moment, but of tho experiences of their forbears all down the ages.—"The Adventures of Jack Rabbit,'' by Richard Kearton, F.Z.S. I hate being conventional— means doing what you don't like, what you never intended to do or never would think of doing, to suit the ideas and notions of other people you don't care tuppence about! — "Tho Eternal Feminine," bv May Isabel Fisk. ' " Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. ... A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied, "I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter.—Henri Bergson. A very great saint may, of course, be remembered through some sheer forco or originality in him; and then the very mystery that involves him for us makes him the harder to forgot; he haunts us the more surely because wo shall never understand him. But the ordinary saints grow faint to posterity, whilst quite ordinary sinners pass vividly down the ages.— -' Zuleika Dobspn/' by .Mai Beerbohm.