PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1989, 7 April 1892, Page 45

PERSONAL NOTES.

Mr C. O. Campbell, who died in Virginia the other day, was conspicuous chiefly because of the fact that he owned the hero of " Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Mrs Mona Caird, who thrilled us all two years ago with her letters on marriage in the Daily Telegraph, is engaged upon a new novel which has a strong socialistic motive.

When Lord Dufferin was Viceroy of India he occupied part of his leisure time by learning Persian, He became so conversant with it that he was able to make a speech in that language to the Afghan Ameer and Sirdars assembled on the north-west frontier.

Louis Kossuth has lately suffered so from asthma and weak eyes that he has had to abandon his favourite studies in botany, of which he has collected over 4000 specimens. The venerable " Liberator " will be 90 years old if he survives till September next.

Lady Carlisle, speaking recently on " Women's Place in Politics," described her-

self as a fanatic on the drink question, and wished that all others were the same. As a Radical, also, she claimed the levelling-up of the working classes, whom the drink sellers were striving to keep down.

The Prince of Wales, like other men, has his hobbies and his idiosyncrasies. He has an invincible horror of black ties and evening dress. The sight of a man thus arrayed at any entertainment which he may happen to attsnd is sufficient to upset and sour him for the entire evening, and in his ejes it is an unpardonable infraction of the laws of good taste and form.

Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte was very proud of the friendly autograph letter which the Queen wrote him in the Jubilee year. It cow transpires that he has left a remarkable pap"er of directions for the embalmment and entombment of his body, ' in which ho desired that the foregoing letter should be placed in one of the pockets of tho coat in in which he wished to be buried.

The Countess Leo Toh toi is an extraordinary woman. She does not share the paradoxical ideals of her husband. But for her ability and practical energy the great novelist would have been in his grave long ago. " All my husband's ditciple?," said the Countess the other day to MissHapgood/the American lady who broke down in the attempt to translate some of the more terrible passages of the " Kreutzer Sonata." " are small, blonde, sickly, and homely— all as like one another as a pair of old boots," and she is quite convinced that they drift into idiocy by following the Count's teaching. The family live as simple, homely, industrious, God-fearing peasants. Plain living and high thinking is their rule.

The " John Oldcastle," whose memoir of Cardinal Manning has been drawn upon rather extensively by the newspaper press, and who has himself (with his accomplished wife) contributed many interesting facts relative to the cardinal to the more or less leading journals, is Mr Wilfrid Meynell, editor and (with his accomplished wife; art critic. He runs a newspaper and magazine on Roman Catholic lines. Mrs Wilfrid Meynell (nee Alice Thompson) is a writer of polished verse of the intense order, which occasionally rise 3to the level of poetry. She is a Saturday Reviewer, a contributor to the National Observer, the Spectator, and the World, and a sister of Lady Butler {nee Elizabeth Thompson), who painted "The Roll Call."

Prince Victor Napoleon, who hopes to see himself one day Emperor of the French, is a tall, stout young man with a Bonapartist cast of countenance and the dar* eyes and skin of an Italian. He lives in Brussels, and has quite a collection of Napoleon I relics, including the ooffee pot and cap whish the Emperor used at St. Helena, quite a collection of his dispatches when a young general, and many of his love letters to the Empress Josephine. Above the writing table whore Prince Victor habitually sits hangs a splendid portrait of his famous granduncle, and in a glass case aTe preserved a look of the Emperor's hair, his riding whip, and a pair of strong doeskin fur-lined gloves, worn by him duiing the retreat from Moscow. It is thought probable that the Empress Eugenic will leave pare of her large fortune to the heir of the Bonapartists.

John Ruskin's hatred of noise in general, and maohinery in particular, gave rise on one occasion to a rather curious incident. Near his house at Coniston, Brantwood, in Lancashire, is a field of wheat, and on a certain autumn morning some time since Mr Ruskin woke with the sound of a reaping machine at work cutting his neighbour's corn. Ruskinian nerves and Kusfcinian prejudices could not stand such a proceeding for a moment, and forthwith the great art critic made his way to the field to order the cessation of the nuisance. There was no help for it, said the man in charge; Ruskin or no Ruskin, his orders were to cut down the wheat, and cut down the wheat must be. Eventually it was decided to refer the matter to the owner of the field, and a short time after, having arranged with him to pay the difference in cost between manual labour and machine, Mr Ruskin departed in " peace with honour," while the reapers proceeded to cut the corn by hand.