LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2085, 8 February 1894, Page 40

LITERARY NOTES.

The description bo commonly applied to dancing as tripping it on the light fantastic toe is from the gravest* of our poets — Milton. The poet, invoking the goddess of mirth in " L' Allegro," Bays : — " Come, and trip it as you go, on the light fantastic toe."

Mr David Christie Murray's new book will be autobiographical in character. In a modest prefatory note to " The Making of a Novelist," Mr Christie Murray describes it as "an experimental booklet." The author proposes to show " how one particular novelist was made, and in what varying fashions the world and fate have tried to teach him his business." In addition to being an expert literary craftsman, Mr Christie Murray enjoys for the purpose of this work the advantage of being able to look back upon a life abonndiDg in incident — a circumstance which cannot fail to endow bis autobiography with special interest and a distinctive charm.

Mrs Caroline H. Dall, wiiting to an American paper about the origin of Longfellow's " Evangeline," gives tbe poet's statement, made to her in answer to an inquiry, as follows : " Some time before I wrote ' Evangeline,' Hawthorne and Sumner were dining with me, and I think there must have been others present After dinner Hawthorne told us that he had lately become interested in the exile of tbeAcadians. It excited his imagination. He fancied two lovers, widely separated and wandering for years, meeting only to die, and wished to make a novel of it. He, however, thought the subject too difficult, and fancied he should have to give it up. X

waited awhile, heard nothing more abont the novel, and finally asked Hawthorne if he were willing that I should make the story the subject of a poem. He gladly consented, and was one of the first to congratulate me on its popularity."

Mr H. O. Houghton, the head of the great American publishing firm of Houghton, Miffia, and Co., who own most of the American classics, such as Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Hawthorne, was once asked why he, such a rich man, went to his office every day, Saturdays included, and stayed there from breakfast to dinner, when be had apparently so muoh leisure while he was at the office. "To say ' No,' " was the reply. And, paradoxical as it may sound, it is the only way in which a publisher can make a fortune. He was printer to the publishing firm long before he became a partner in it. Daring the war necessity drove him to employing a number of women compositors, a practice whioh he still maintains, because it; makes the men compositors so much better behaved. In the manufacturing departments the bulk of his skilled workmen are British.

Dc Oliver Wendell Holmes thinks that the literatures of England and America are drawing closer year by year. Mr Hamlin Garland, a promising young American writer of the West Western, thinks differently. The true literature of America is to come out of the West, and is to be divided by the whole width of the Prairie as well as the Atlantic from the literature of this old England. Which is right— Age or Crabbed Youth ? Probably both right and both wrong. It takes all sorts to make even an American world. But one may remind Mr Garland that the cant of nationality may be as muoli overdone in letters as in politios ; and that to strive and cry after originality is not to be original. Bret Harte was, in a sense, new. Has he had to complain of his English welcome? There was something new in Walt; Whitman to be glad of. And where wonld Whitman have been but for his English friends ?

The number of men who can write legibly with the left hand is very small in European countries, where the fact of being ambidextrous is not appreciated at its full worth. Sir Edwin Arnold states that in Japan every child is taught to write with either hand ; and he hints that this was not the only evidence of sound common sense he met with while, in the kingdom of the Mikado. There have been many remedies suggested for what is known as writer's cramp, and many writers alternate between the pen and the typewriter ; but the simplest plan of all is to acquire the art of- writing with either hand, and change on the first suspicion of fatigue. It is quite easy for a child to learn to write with the left hand, and, although after the musoles have got set with age it is more difficult, almost any man can learn to write with his left hand in a week, and to write as well with one hand as the other in less than a year.

In 1843 I waited upon Mr Thackeray at his humble lodging in Jermyn street to ask him to write for the Pictorial Times. The apartment was an exceedingly plainly furnished bedroom, with common rush-seated chairs and painted French bedstead, and with neither looking-glass nor prints on the bare, cold, cheerless-looking walls. On the table was a frugal breakfast tray — a cup of chocolate and some dry toast. Mr Thaokeray at once undertook to write upon art, to review such books as he might fancy, and to contribute an occasional article on the opera, more with reference to its frequenters, he remarked, than from a critical point of view. So satisfied was he with the three guineas offered him for a couple of columns weekly, that he jocularly expressed himself willing to sign an engagement for life upon these terms. I can only suppose, from the eager way in which he closed with my proposal, that the prospect of an additional £160 to his income was at that moment anything but a matter of indifference.— .Vizetelly's " Glances Back Through Seventy Years."

— According to Max O'Rell, an English" woman is seldom handsome after 30.

— The German professor of music to be met with in -English drawing rooms is an entertaining old gentleman. To him recently a lady said, when one of hit! compositions had jaet been rendered by one of the guests : ' " How did you like the rendering of your song. Professor, " Vas dat my song ? " replied the professor. I did not know him."

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