LITERARY NOTES.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1290, 19 November 1896, Page 12

LITERARY NOTES.

“ I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love readirg.”—Lord Macaulay.

Address all communications for this column to The Editor, Nkw Zealand Mail.’* Publishers and booksellers are invited to send books and publications of general interest for notice in tins column, thereby enabling country reudeis to be in touch with the latest works in the Colony.

Publishers sending books for review are requested to mention their price.

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

The venerable Aubrey de Vero is one of the very few men now living- who talked with Wordsworth, and from him Wordsworth first heard Tennyson’s lines, “Of old sat Freedom on the heights.” Though not an ungrudging admirer of contemporary talent, Wordsworth allowed that the lines were “ stately.”

It is said that J. 11. Shorthouse, author of “John Inglesant,” kept the manuscript of that book in a glass case for twenty years, now and then reading it to bis friends. London publishers heard of the book and induced him to permit its publication.

Dr George Ebers, the novelist and Egyptologist, writes to a friend in Chicago, denying the recent report that he had become a Buddhist. “ I have not become a Buddhist,” he says. “ I remain a Christian to the end, and also educate my children as Christians. I teach them to love the Holy One as earnestly as mother taught these truths to me.”

One of the most prolific authors of short stories in England is Mr Pett Ridge, who, in the brief five years he has been writing them, has produced two hundred and fifty, besides a,countless number of sketches and dialogues. Mr Pett Ridge is thirty-five years old. He is an employee, on a small salary, of the municipality of London, and this gave him his entire support until ho went into journalism.

It has been said by a friend of Thomas Hardy that Jude, the hero of his famous book, is, in some directions, a portrait of the author —not in the story of his career, of course, but in divers characteristics, and especially in some of his dislikes. Mr Hardy’s latest work is a short story written in collaboration with Mrs Ilenniker Heaton, Lord Houghton’s daughter. “The Spectre of the Real” is its title, and Roberts Brothers are its publishers iu this country.

Ouida, after the enforced sale of her beautiful furniture by the authorities of the United Italy, which she so hates and reviles, has retired to a villa in the environs of Lucca, where she is concentrating all her bitterness against Italy in a three-volume novel.

Alphonse Daudefc is a Southerner, and the cold winds of Paris annoy him greatly. In his study in his bouse in the Faubourg St. Germain a large fire is burning even when the weather is comparatively warm. Daudet is unable to woi-k unless the temperature of the room is to his liking.

lan Maclaren says that every man who will not work should be compelled to do so at the point of the bayonet.

Mascagni, the composer of tho famous inter-mezzo, will print a volume of poems this winter.

A Christiania paper says that Ibsen has just commenced to write a new drama. He expects to have the play ready, not only in the original, but in German, English and French translations, in December. Ho has just entered his sixty-ninth year, and enjoys tho perfect health peculiar to literary men who do not overwork or dissipate.

Marion Crawford’s now story, “A Rose of Yesterday,” will begin in the November number of the Century Magazine and will run for six months.

Thackeray made a humorous protest which has been echoed by all great men since, against the social miseries entailed on famous men. Why might they not leave behind them their professions when they went into society ! J “If you ask Blondin to tea,” he said, “ you don’t have a rope stretched from your garret window to the opposite side of the square and request monsieur to take his tea on the centre of the rope.”

Dr Conan Doyle recently confessed to the London Author’s Club that he began to write to get a little money to pay his bills. For ten years nearly all his manuscript came back to him almost by return post. His first profitable article was for a trade paper. Dr Doyle is now thirty-seven years old. The choicest moment of his life, he said, was when Thackeray patted him on the head, a boy of five years, and praised him.

The first part of George du Maurier’s forthcoming novel, “ The Martian,” appears in the current number of Harper's Magazine, with the author’s own illustrations.