HOME GOSSIP.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 189, 28 November 1876, Page 2

HOME GOSSIP.

(" Atlas" in the World.)

Mr. Henry Chaplin, M.P., a wellknown sporting squire, and a great "chum" of the Prince of Wales, is to be married in a few weeks to the Lady Florence Gower, eldest daughter of the Duke of Sutherland.

Mr. Plimsoll has been receiving great honors at Christiania, in Norway. On the 14th September he was treated to a torchlight procession, with bands and banners, which marched to his hotel and there presented him with an address. The crowd is estimated to have contained 20,000 persons, and the greatest enthusiasm prevailed.

An oi'der has been issued reviving the practice of cheering by British troops when charging an enemy. A battalion of ttte 6th Fusiliers were exercised in charging and cheering on Woolwich Common on September 8. The fact is said to have been " somewhat imposing." The houses once occupied by two celebrated English authors, contemporaries of each other, are likely to be demolished soon. Goldsmith's house at Peckham, where he lived when usher to Dr. Milman, and where he wrote his " Vicar of Wakefield," has lately been sold, and is to be pulled down to be replaced by a modern villa. The other house is Pope's villa, at Twickenham, which is now in the market. A great part of the original building, however, has already been pulled down by the present owner, Lady Howe. In a letter, in answer to one from a Devonshire curate, who had asked him to advocate the necessity of curates' stipends being increased, Mr. Gladstone says that "clerical labour is likely to remain, on the average, the lowest paid with reference to its value."

The Spectator says that " the Governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon, is, perhaps, the most noteworthy man now in the Colonial service—a man, we fear, of domineering temper, who accumulates dislikes on himself as other men accumulate money, but for all that, a God-fearing, just, and able man, who thinks the poor and weak ought to have justice, and will sacrifice not only his time but his comfort in the effort to insurse that they do have it. His testimony is beyond doubt." The newspapers announce to -as that a well-known member of the House of Commons and liis charming and most popular wife sailed last week for New York, en route for Philadelphia. But what the newspapers did not tell us, and what is nevertheless true, is, that "thebaby" was most unwittingly shipped "free on board" as one of the impedimenta, inasmuch as Madame, naturally as an English gentlewoman, who could not get on without a personal attendant, and a "lady's maid" is an impossibility on the other side of the Atlantic. Therefore the nurse was taken, for her sake, as admissible. This is a fact. It reminds me, though in a difierent sense, of what Charles Mathews pere delighted our fathers with fifty years ago in his At Home —" T.iis is the land of Hberfcj'. Every one may do as he likes with his own. What will you give me for that 'ere d—d nigger V'

Considering that we English advertise more largely than any other nation in the world, it is astonishing what little fertility of invention we suow in our advertisements. I confess to finding the supplement of my Times at this time of year very enjoyable reading ; that is to say, be it understood, after I have gone through all the leaders and the entire war news. But I never see anything new. The excitement caused by discovering that Hokanlogostikon refers to a pair of braces, or that lonkawlletigos is the name of a new string, soon dies away, and the rest of the advertisements are merely bald unromantic facts. They order these things better in San Francisco, where they preface the avowal of their wares with a siurt anecdote. For example, I saw in a recent number of a 'Frisco paper the following : —" 'You must learn to be manly and resolute, my boy,' said a father to his son; ' you must learn to say. ko.' Half an hour afterwards, when that father told his son to go and chop wood, the boy said ' No,' with an amount of firmness that showed how he appreciated the parental teaching. He wouldn't have said Ko, however, if the old man had given him to go and have a brandy-cocktail at So-and-so 's noted bar."

The world was a good deal younger when Charles Mackay began to sing ; and it seems many years since he filled a prominent place in t::e literature of the day. He is not dead, however, or even sleeping, but is hard at work upon a Gaelic dictionary, which is to prove that most languages, ancient and modern —including all those spoken in the ultimate stage of the buildino- of the Tower of Babel—find their roots in Gaelic. Dr. Mackay's poems and songs, bublished between the years IS4O and 1875, are now out of print, or live only in the music-sheets. They appeared successively in ten small volumes, and in the intervals of his severer labor, the Doctor is collecting them; and they will shortly be published in a cheap form for the people, and in an edition de luxe, illustrated by Gilbert, for the library. The Ounard steamship Abyssinia, leaving Liverpool for New York on Saturday,

the 30th inst., will have oh board her the bearer of a well-known name. Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper proceeds to America to give a series of readings from his own "works in .the principal cities of the States. Mr. Topper's -writings are popular throughout the world, and the generous American' audiences will be pleased to find themselves face to face with their author. Of his excellence as a poet there may be —there probably will be—much diversity of opinion ; but all will unite in paying deference to the frank geniality and bonhomie which have enabled Mr, Tupper to treat a vast amount of chaff—not always levelled in the best taste—with dignity and good humour. Their name must be iegion who will join in wishing the sage of Albury a pleasant voyage and a "good time." An unkind joke was played off the other day at the expense of a representative of the Daily Telegraph, who, contrary to the usual practice of the widely circulated, is positively writing his war correspondence " from the front" in Belgrade, and not in Fleet-street. An Irishman, travelling for his health, met him at ; the Crown Hotel and told him he was on TchernayefFs staff, and that his name was Cecophithecus Callitrichus, and that they just had a smart brush with the enemy at Treron Sphenura. It is to be presumed the Irishman lied ; for the first words are zoological Latin for green monkey, and the second for wedge-tailed pigeon. It has been computed that, tradespeople apart, Mr. Gladstone is the most extensive customer for half-pennv post-cards the Post Office possesses. If the right honorable gentleman could only realise the amount of heart-burning and indignation this habit engenders in the minds of his correspondents, he would probably employ a secretary, and use notepaper, envelopes and penny stamps. He might plead an illustrious example for the apparent penury of his stationery arrangements. Pope, it is well known, was much more careful of his paper than he was of his spite. This habit was so notorious that Swift calls him " Paper-sparing Pope.." Dr. Percy, the "Bishop of Dromore, preserved—and it is probably in existence now—a slip of paper "no larger than a common message-card," as Boswell contemptuously describes it, on which was written a note to Richardson, bringing under his notice Dr. Johnson's " London." If Pope were alive now he would be a great patron of the post-card. But it might be worth Mi*. Gladstone's conside-V ration whether even he can afford to have >' post-cards under his signature read out to" public meetings. The class of people with whom he corresponds through this cheap and convenient medium is the very one who most feel the implied slight. Mr. Gladstone might, if he pleased, write on a post-card to JKarl Granville or Mr. Bright without fear of giving offence, whereas the well-meant post-card is a deadly insult in the eyes of the vain busy-bodies accustomed to " draw " the ex-Premier on political questions. Perhaps the best way out of the difficulty would be for Mr. Gladstone to reduce his correspondence by one-half, and put two halfpenny stamps on his letters.

After an absence of some years from London, Mr. Barry Sullivan is to re-ap-pear as Richard 111. at Drury Lane. Mr. Barry Sullivan is a good actor of tlie old school, vigorous, and alert, well versed in stage traditions and expedients, and skilled in the elocutionary system that delights in deep bass notes of stomachic quality. He is assured of a cordial reception from his numerous admirers ; but I do wish he would appear as Shakespeare's Richard rather than as Gibber's. It is really high time that Gibber's pasticcio was sent the way of Nahum Tate's "King Lear," Davenant's "Macbeth," Dryden's Tempest," and various other shameful manglings of the poet. I shall be told, of course, that Garrick and Henderson, Eean and Kemble, Cooke and Macready, all found Gibber's Richard good enough for them; but I find no satisfaction in that argument. Cibber may be credited with the capital claptraps, " So much for Buckingham !" and " Richard's himself again ■" and with many other startling lines of his own invention. But his version otherwise is but cento of passages from " Richard ll.from the second part of "Henry 1V.," from "Henry V.," the three parts of " Henry V 1.," and from the original " Richard H 1.," with some borrowing from Caryl's old play of the "English Princess, or the Death of Richard ill." The speeches of Henry V., delivered at the Queen's Theatre in the play to which they legitimately belong, will be presently heard at Drury Lane from tha lips of "usurping Richard" in the adaptation of Cibber! Surely in these times, when so much reverence for Shakespeare is professed, his integrity should be respected in Drury Lane Theatre. I regret that the management has let slip a valuable opportunity. With the exception of two performances at Covent Garden in 1821, and a careful revival of the tragedy in 1848, during Mr. Phelps' tenancy of Sadler's Wells, the "perfect Richard" of Shakespeare has not been seen upon, the stage since the reopening of the theatres in 1660.