THE BOOKMAN'S HARVEST.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19061, 4 July 1925, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE BOOKMAN'S HARVEST.

GLEANINGS IN THE FIELD. Recent English papers contain mativ tributes to the lato Sir Rider Haggard. In lais death, says a writer in the Sunday Times, English literature has lost the greatest writer of romance in a generation. Novelists as great as, and, in some respects, gTeater than he wero his contemporaries, but not ono of them had the same sure touch of romance that appeals to every boy. He was a creator of character in tho sense that Scott and Stevenson were. Who does not know " Allaif " ? Hero wo liavo a character clothed in flesh and blood, and not a mere bundle of philosophies or a prose poet.

Mr. A. A. Milne, in this day of grooves and specialisation, has the courage to be vara a tile, and. in the language of our American kinsmen ho gets away with it too. No sooner, as one critic observes, was ho safely labelled a Punch man, rising into popularity with books of his reprinted humorous sketches, than ho broke away and became even more brilliantly successful as a dramatist; ho scored with a sensational novel (" Ihe Red Hoiuo Mystery '); and his delightful "When Wo Were Very Young," published last year, is proving a best-seller both in England and America. He has now completed a new book of the same kind, A Gallery of Children," to be published Bhorl.lv, with illustrations by Miss Willebeko le Mair, who is known as America's K.'ltc Grccnaway.

Mi'. Hilaire Belloc is engaged upon a History <>!: England in four volumes, of which the first volume has just been published, It is written avowedly from an ardent Roman Catholic standpoint, and the main object of tho work is to em■phasiso " tho historical truth that the chief social and political phenomena of national liistory are religious, not matters of i*ace. and still less matters of language.

Tho reif;u of the " professional beauty " in later Victorian days is recalled by tho latest book of reminiscences, " 'lbe Days 1 Knew," by Lillio Langtry (Lady do Bathe). There is that touch, says a icyiewer, oT the unusual and bizarre about all the main happenings of her life which fate seems to reserve for all outstanding personalities. She had but just attained the age of 14 when she received her first offer of marriage, and she was only 16 when she actually married. And within a few months she found herself acclaimed as the supremo beauty of her day, all London proclaiming her triumph, poets, statesmen, popular actors contending for her smiles, prominent painters bidding against rach other for the privilege o; transferring her features to canvas.

Watts, Whistler and Millais parted her, Oscar Wildo wrote poems about her, haunted the street in which she lived and ,vent to sleep on her doorstep to be 'awakened by Mr. Langtry falling over him. An unpremeditated twisting of her hair into a ball on the naoe of her neck became the fashionable coiffure, a hastilyimprovised head-dress consisting of a fold cf velvet transfixed with a feather bec-ami " the Langtry toque," the only possible wear for a women of iashion. A horde of Texan cowboys, who had never seen her face-, I.nstened their village now a flourishing township—by her name, in connection with this she tells an amusing story. Being invited to visit ths place, Mrs. Langtry, to soften her refusal, offered to provide an ornamental drinking fountain. The offer was not accepted, " as the "only thing the citizens of Langtry dicl not drink was water."

The name of Dickens is so bound up with f/ondon that we are apt, to forget that the novelist was, to quote his own words, " both a town traveller and a country traveller." Mr. Walter Dexter, in " Tine England of Dickens," traces the Dickensian associations of the homo counties, the Thames Valley, the west as far as Land's End, the Midlands arid North Wales, Yorkshire and the north, •with special chapters " On the Track of Little Nell," the "Hard Times" country, ui.id tha Copperfield country.

Tho publication by the Bodley Head of the Fugger News-letters, chosen from the multitudinous correspondence of a great 16th-century banking-house, was ' men--tionod somo time ago in these columns. Tho experiment has proved so successful that a further translation from the cot.respondents is now promised, dealing this time entirely with domestic and general affairs of Elizabethan England.