BOOKS AND WRITERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19608, 9 April 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND WRITERS.

The husband of Mrs. Beeton! J. B. •Priestley in one of his entertaining essays pictures him "a little, wistful man rising ■with a half-suppressed sigh from his cold mutton and lumpy potatoes to visit his wife in her study and inquire, a little timidly, how she is progressing with her notes on mayonaisse of chicken." It comes sit a shock to find that he was a friend 0 £ that indefatigable journalist T. P: O'Connor, who describes him as "more liitce a French officer than an English-. msn; tall, moustached, with an imperial, little eyes and a lithe but very slight frame."

It is significant, however, that T.P. also speaks of his friend as living cn a regime; "he used to have brought in either medicine or a cup of soup every hour when he and I were discussing things." One is tempted to speculate whether this delicacy of digestion was the result of over-indulgence in cold mutton ©r (more probably) mayonaisse. At all e?ents he outlived his wife many years.

Jeffery Farnol in "The Days of My Youth" series in T.P.'s and- Cassell's Weekly describes how ho "began life as apprentice to an engineer and then turned eeene-painter before he finally discovered where his real talent lay. "The Broad Highway," his first great success, was written in New York, but much of the book, particularly the character of Black George, came from his early experiences in the workshops. While he was scenepj.inting in America at the Astor Theatre he* began to send short stories to the magazines and he tells how, while sitting in an editor's outside office, ho used to meet a man so quiet and retiring that he seemed he must be an Englishman. He turned out to be one of the greatest short story writers in the world—o. Henry.

*'The Letters o! Mrs. Thrale," selected by R Brimley Johnson, give ample evidence of her witty, spirited and undaunted outlook on life. Best known for her long friendship with Dr. Johnson, yet. she was to find how heavy the chains cf friendship can he, for her second mar-, riage, though purely one of affection, was bitterly resented both by Dr, Johnson and his circle. ''Nothing does revolt me so," tana one of the letters, "as that true British spirit of tearing out every private transaction for public discussion and amusement" —a pathetically sincere cri de coeur-

No respectable Victorian home library jwas considered complete without a copy of Craden's Concordance. How strange, then, to discover that the unassisted compiler of that laborious volume was a wild and unbalanced young man, whose flightiness was attributed to the bite of a mad dog in his boyhood. "The Adventures of Cruden'' is the name of an artjrie in a recent issue of the Empire Review and tells of the vicissitudes in his life. At one time he was secretary Ho the Earl of Derby, at another a tutor in the Isle of Man. In 1732 ho set up a bookseller's shop in London and when a second .edition of the Concordance, was called for it was dedicated, by permission, to George the Third, from whom he received a hundred guineas. The value of the book is proved by the fact that no later work of the kind has superseded it. Unfortunately, Cruden received little monetary return for the enormous labour of compilation.

"What might be truly called "Anatole France—The Last Phase," is provided by Madame Kerevrii, the woman who, when, after the death of his lifelong friend Madame Arman de Cavaillet, he "lay inert, refusing food and discoursing on the philosophic convenience of suicide," came nobly to the. rescue and drew him from "the dark waters of despair to which ho had almost yielded himself." The story of these last days is told in "Rambles with Anatole France" (Benn) and one of the most interesting passages may be quoted as characteristic of France's sceptical iranv.

''Our religion," the distinguished author remarks, "looks too much like man's concoction, and our notions of divinity are too sordid to be of divine origin. The evolution of religion is suspiciously reminiscent of our own dust-born existence. * . „ . Religibns are eternally changing and adapting themselves to the tastes, nay, caprices of their followers. Gods are changing even more fundamentally than men. . . . The God of the Christians has nndergone the most radical change owing to the fact , that He rules over a motley crowd, Greeks, Romans and barbarians, a.■ . The poor Communist, Christ, is only a distant relative of Christ, the defender of Capitalism and the sworn enemy of Socialism. He, the humble soul, lives in the imagination of the faithful as a sovereign ruler, fenthroned _in the midst -of the greatest pomp, like the Popr, His terrestrial representative.

The Eton College Chronicle, first issued ©n May 14, 1853, recently reached its 2000 th number. Other school magazines of long standing are the Wykehamist (1867), Elizabethan (Westminster, *B*4) and the Harrovian (1888). Ex-editors of the Chronicle include Lord Harris, 1/ora Dajfnlev, Lord Astor, the present Provost of Eton, and the Bishop of Salisbury. ."The Chronicle," said Mr. Austen Leigh, an old Etonian* to a Sunday Times interviewer, "has only once contained a crossword puzzle and that was a, Greek one by a famous scholar."