PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1942, 7 February 1889, Page 37

PERSONAL NOTES.

Should the Marquis of Hartington succeed his father, he will be the first of his house who has done so since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Prince George of Wale 3is entitled to the freedom of the City of London by patrimony. His grandfather, father, and uncles have all been freemen, and so will Prince George. "Bismarck is a Doctor of Divinity of the University of Giessen. He says he owes the honour to his constant efforts in the cause of tolerant and practical Christianity. The Shah will visit Europe next spring. He will proceed to the various European capitals in the following order :—St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, Brussels, Vienna, and Constantinople. Miss Braddon (Mrs John Maxwell) is spending the winter in the South of France. She is not taking a holiday, however, as far as her literary work is concerned, for she writes for several hours every day. Mr Jonathan Alexander, of Edinburgh, is dead. He was at Waterloo, and he kept guard over Napoleon on St. Helena. He also presented arms to George IV at Holyrood in 1822. Aged 88. Pascal Porter, " the boy preacher," is really what his title claims. He is only 12 years old; and he has been preaching for two years. He not only expounds the Bible text, but quotes poetry, and argues with all the force of a logician. His father says he began preaching before he left off pinafores. The Prince of Wales is above all a clever man; one who thinks clever things, says clever things, and above all does clever things; he would be a man of note had he been born an ordinary nobleman —nay, we could go further and assert without fear of any contradiction that his exalted rank has rather militated against the full and free display of the very eminent intellectual gifts with which he has been endowed by no niggard Providence. If poets are to be judged by their greatest and rarest things rather than by their general achievement, not three poets in English literary history can be ranked above Marlowe. If his genius was more Titanic than divine, if it lacked the measure and the order, the humour and the grace, which accompanied, in his only greater contemporary, a genius far vaster and mightier than his own, its production remains the chief example in English of a certain poetical kind, the kind of the lightning flash rather than of the steady flood of sunlight or moonlight.— Saturday Review. A MILLIONAIRE'S EARLY HISTORY. 1 Mr Charles Crocker, the American millionaire, who died quite recently, and left his daughter £2,000,000, had a remarkable history. Born in obscurity and poverty in Troy, then a village in the State of New York, his first business transaction was the selling of newspapers, in which he did better than any boy in the place. When in his seventeenth year he left home in search of better fortune, his kit was something less than Whittington's, consisting solely of a cotton shirt, a pair of socks, a spare cotton handkerchief, and, treasured above all, a linen shirt-front designed for State occasions. He began work as a farm hand, drifted on to a sawmill, apprenticed himself to a blacksmith, discovered an iron mine, went gold hunting to California in the fifties, and when he was 32 years of age was comparatively well off. But he was only beginning life. " Finding his way, when the Central Pacific railroad was started, to the Golden Gite, it was Charles Crocker, in conjunction with C P. Huntingdon, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins, who made this great railway and their own ! fortunes. !