LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1934, 19 March 1891, Page 38

LITERARY NOTES.

j Louis Janvier, a Haytiah negro, has ref cently published In taris a novel which is said to sheft considerable ability. Ninety-nine out of every 100 new books may be set down as containing no original thought or fresh fact ; all their matter has been printed over and over again in different forms. — National Observer. The incomes from the London daily papers are thus put down { — Daily Telegraph* £130,000 j Times, £120,000 ; Standard, £70,000 } Morning Post, £45,000 ; Daily Chronicle, £40,000; and Daily News, £30,000. Native journals in Hindostan have for some time past adopted the word " Indian " for " native," as for some inexplicable reason they considered the former term objectionaole. But now the editor of a leading native paper has begun to write of his compatriots as •* aboriginals." The expression, " The streafe of silver sea," jis Mr Gladstone's. It appeared in his famous essay on " Germany, France, and England," published in the Edinburgh Review for October 1870. Mr Gladstone was Prime Minister when it was written, and the Franco-Grerman war was at its height. Archaeological discoveries of great interest continue to be made at Rome, where excavations are being carried on in all directions. Quite recently the well-known civil engineer, Mr Bute, in the course of works he is super- j intending, has come upon an inscription j which fixes> without doubt, the exact spot where the Emperor Nero committed suicide. j Miss Amelia B. Edwards recently gave an interesting lecture before the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society on "The Art of the Novelist." She sketched the rise and progress of the novel from the most j ancient example of fiction in existence — an Egyptian romance, entitled " The Tale of Two Brothers," written on 10 sheets of papyrus, which is preserved in the British Museum — down to the present day. Mrs Maxwell-Scott, who cditf d the delightful " Journal " of Sir Walter Scott, is the great-granddaughter of the famous author of " Waverley." On her marriage with the Honourable J. O. Maxwell, a son of Lord Herries, she and her husband were permitted by special act to adopt the appellation of Maxwell-Scott, in order to preserve the great novelist's name from extinction. The present Lord Herries having no sen, and the second brother being unmarried, it is not impossible that the title and large estate of Herries may yet descend to Walter Maxwell-Scott, a bright boy of 13, who, it is said, is to be knighted] on attaining his majority, that there may be another Sir Walter Scott. Count Tolstoi is one of the few living authors who has been honoured by the publication of certain of his works in an edition specially intended for the use of the blind. His "Peace and War," which was transcribed by his niece, Mdlle. Kuseminskaga, into the raised characters used by sightless readers, has just been published at St. Petersburg; a fact which has given the severer critics of the anthor of "The Kreutger Sonata " an opportunity of suggesting that he furnishes a new example of the blind leading the blind. As the type used for the blind is relatively very large,' the bulk of any long work transcribed into it is very great. Thus, Dr Moon, an eminent authority on such matters, calculates that Mrs H. Ward's |* Robert Elsmere " would, were an edition of it specially prepared for the blind, occupy no less than 17 large volumes. A complete set of the books of Euclid is in use for the education of the blind, as well as several works on astronomy full of explanatory diagrams.