LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1916, 10 August 1888, Page 35

LITERARY NOTES.

The British Museum Library increases at the rate of more than 100 volumes a day.

"Scorn not the sonnet," wrote Wordsworth in his day ; in ours that poetical form has come so much into credit that it suffers from poetasters and criticasters in a different way — the name is borrowed and tagged on to any and every form of verse.— Pall Mall Gazette.

Headers of the poems of Charles Mackay, well known as the author of the favourite songs, " Cheer boys, cheer," " There's a good time coming," "TubalCain," &c.,willbeglad to learn that Messrs Whitraker and Co., London, are about to publish a selection of his most popular poems and songs. The complete poetical works of this author have been out of print for some time, and a longfelt .want for a cheaper edition will be .here-with-supplied. Edward Fitzgerald, who dieci a little while ago — the translator of Omar Khayyam,, the' friend of Thackeray, Carlyle, Tennyson — even in so common a word as " valet " spoke after the Englsh fashion, pronouncing it vallett. But he had, indeed, the courage of an older day, for he would ndne of- the modern " drahma," though of the " drayma " he talked to you for hours. — Illustrated London News. The late Mr J. E. Green's " Short History of the English People " has been translated into French by M. Auguste Monod, and the editor of the "EeuveHistorique" has written a preface to the translation, discussing the historical and material conditions which bring about changes in races that were at one time closely alike. In the " Nemesis of Faith," Mr Froude's gloomy theological romance, published in 1849, the sceptical clergyman makes love to a married lady, deserts her in an agony of mind when her child is drowned, intends to commit suicide, is checked by a Catholic priest, is reconverted to Catholicism, retires into a monastery, and becomes a , sceptic again. , Messrs , Trubner and Co., are publishing " Selections from Sir Edwin Arnold's English Poems," with some new pieces. Sir Edwin remarks in his preface :—": — " As it has been sometimes thought and said, inaccurately, that the author is exclusively devoted to Oriental subjects of verse, and as he may yet again recur to these, he has here complied with the desire that a selection should be made from his non-Oriental poems." Miss Winifrede M. Wyse is writing a biography of her uncle, the late Sir Thomas Wyse, X.C.8., LL.D., the British Envoy Extraordinary and • Minister Plenipotentiary at Athens, from 1849 to 1862. The -life of Sir Thomas Wyse was in several respects an eventful one, as a member of the House of Commons, as an advocate of popular education, and as the husband of Letitia, daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, to whom he was married in 1821, and from whom he was separated in 1828 — St. James' Gazette. •The letter E is used more often jthan any other in all of the five languages about which you inquire. Out of every thousand letters in ordinary prose it occurs the following number of times : — English, 137 I German, 178 French, 184 | Italian, 131 Spanish, 145. The only other letters in these languages of which more than 100 occur in 1000 letters are I, 103 per 1000 in Italian ; N, 10 per 1000 in German ; O, 107 per 1000 in Spanish From a most interesting paper, entitled " London as a Literary Centre," which appears in "Harper's Monthly" for May, we learn that Christina Rossetti, whose " deeply spiritual poems are known even more widely than those of her more famous brother, Dante Gabriel Eossetti, still lives in London, an invalid and recluse, with that same sad, sweet face of the religieus which her brother had so often delighted to paint, producing ' hymns and spiritual songs ' as the spirit moves her. Her first known poems are those of the 'Goblin Market' volume, of a weird mysticism and singular sweetness ; but her brother William has, among other treasures in which his house ! in London is rich, a plain little book, privately printed on their grandfather's press, and very likely set in type by his own hand 3, containing poems which this remarkable child had produced from the age of 13 up to 16. Her latest poems are to be found in the setting of her recent year-book of devotion, • Time Flies.' " Of Jean Ingelow we are told that she " comes rightly by her Lincolnshire subjects, for she was born in old Boston, in that county ; but in later years she has spent much of her time in Kensington, though her strong, sensible, womanly • face is not much seen in literary circles. At the Kensington home she gives what she calls her ' copyright dinners ' — because they are paid for from the proceeds of her books — at which she gathers poor people, old and young, to share her pleasant bounty. She is now in the later fifties, and between poems, novels, and charming children's books has done quite her share of work since her first and now forgotten novel of 1851, 'Allerton and Dreux.' "